The police budget has escaped

I-Police was supposed to connect all of our police forces’ IT systems. Five years and 139.4 million euros later, the platform does not exist. We thought 76 million had been lost. Ta-da! Almost double that. In Belgium, even fiascos get their accounting updates.

The 2021 contract with the French company Sopra Steria promised “quick wins” within twelve to eighteen months. The milestones were never defined, the controls never switched on. But one application ran perfectly: automatic payment. Every month, no conditions, no checks. A hundred consultants spent years drawing comfortable fees with nothing to show for it. Nearly 500 consultants worked on this file. Utter madness.

This is no longer an IT project, it is a little mafia with the same survival reflexes. Nobody wanted to saw off the branch they were sitting on so comfortably.

30 million in licences, 21 million of them unusable. Some bought as early as 2021 “to use up credits”. Buying what you do not yet know how to use so that the money does not sit idle. To govern is to foresee, as someone once said. Yes: to foresee that you will not know how to use it.

Before the judge, everyone has their own version. The supplier claims the project changed. The State claims the project never started. A ball of hypocrites, the classic choreography of contractual divorces, except that here they are arguing over who must answer for hundreds of millions, and taxpayers have already paid for the bricks of a house that never had a roof.

The federal police are claiming 244 million from Sopra Steria, a judicial investigation has been opened for misappropriation of public funds, and former minister Verlinden is discovering that the courthouse has shutters on its windows. The irony: the police, whose job is to establish responsibility, must investigate their own waste. A 139-million practical exercise.

In the private sector, an executive who burns millions without results is thrown to the crocodiles. Here, they get an audit, a parliamentary commission and a three-hundred-page report, while Qatargate and the like gather mould on a quayside, neatly stored in shoeboxes that let in water. It is all about who will have the budget for the investigation, but not for the result. You would think the police’s artistic vagueness was run by organised crime.

An external audit of the project was set up in 2024, and the conclusion of that analysis landed on the desk of the new minister, Quintin, who called a halt in December 2025. He stopped everything.

And the funniest part is that Sopra Steria was instructed by registered letter not to take part in the commission of inquiry. Strange. Very strange. Le Soir link: https://www.lesoir.be/730978/article/2026-02-25/la-police-deconseille-sopra-steria-de-se-presenter-aux-audiences-sur-i-police

On 27 October, Le Soir and De Standaard revealed that the Justice Minister’s spokesperson had been charged with breach of professional secrecy. The spokesperson, no less. The man whose job is to talk, suspected of having mostly wanted to listen. A discreet spokesperson is rare. This discreet, it is suspicious.

It concerns an attempt to access confidential information about the I-Police investigation. This federal police IT project is about as useful as an umbrella in Knokke in November.

And the thread keeps getting tangled. Verlinden defended Sopra Steria as a lawyer. Her partner works at a firm that advised the company. The minister denies any conflict of interest. True or not, the questions remain: who wanted to know what? Was the minister aware?

The final question, the most dizzying one: what safeguards protect an investigation when it concerns the person now in charge of Justice? The separation of powers is not a fantasy. Apparently, for the public authorities, it is not, or no longer, a priority.

In any other country, she would have been fired or would have had the decency to resign, but in Belgium it is surreal to see how abnormally high our tolerance threshold is...

Everything has been said, even in the subsidised media. But nobody moves...

Personally, I will supply the feathers!!!!

Sources: Le Soir / De Standaard, RTBF/Belga, 27 October 2026 / Le Soir, 21 October 2026.

Who is Sopra Steria?

A few lines on the service provider Sopra Steria, which champions humanity. I quote, strictly verbatim, the promise displayed on their website (www.soprasteria.be)

The world is how we shape it.

Sopra Steria, a major player in the European technology sector, is recognised for its expertise in consulting, digital services and software development. It supports its clients in their digital transformation and enables them to achieve concrete and lasting results.

It offers end-to-end solutions to make large companies and organisations more competitive, combining in-depth knowledge of a wide range of business sectors and innovative technologies with a fully collaborative approach.

Sopra Steria places people at the heart of everything it does and is committed to putting digital technology at the service of its clients in order to build a better future for all. With 52,000 employees in nearly 30 countries, the Sopra Steria group generated revenue of 5.8 billion euros in 2023.

A new era of growth and competitiveness