Export firm MD’s Amsterdam horror
Gets threat calls from Dutch national that he will be killed or slapped with a false drug trafficking charge
By : bellie thomas
Update: 2015-05-10 05:50 GMT
Bengaluru: “No matter who you are, if you are on a foreign soil, insecurities are a part and parcel of your journey, but what if the threats become more dangerous in nature like knocking you off by hired killers, or getting you jailed by planting drugs in your baggage, then you have only one option – take to heels, reach a safe country and be relieved that you are still alive,” said H.S. Shetty, managing director of an export company called Mysore Mercantile Company Limited in Bengaluru.
Shetty (55) was on a business visit to Amsterdam in Netherlands recently, when he received a threatening call from an advocate attorney of law there. “I was at a pub in Amsterdam along with my two other business delegates when I received the call from Hans Mathijsen, an advocate whom our company had hired for an arbitration earlier, but terminated him later,” said Shetty. “It was a 16-minute call in which he (Hans Mathijsen) threatened me that he was sending hired killers to finish me off to the hotel where I stayed and if I manage to escape, he would have contrabands planted in my baggage with the help of his airport sources and get me jailed for drug trafficking,” he added.
He had threatened me over an old arbitration suit in which he claimed that my company had to pay additional charges to him for the services he had rendered during the hearings of the arbitration suit, for which my company had already paid him all the dues. The arbitration was for a dispute on the import of sugarcane molasses from a Netherlands-based company who had made my company also as a respondent.
“As I had taken a new phone number to use overseas from Matrix, only my family, clients, few business delegates and my travel agent knew the number. I am still shocked and wondering Hans managed to get his hands on my phone number and the hotel address where I stayed. He could have misused his professional capacity for obtaining that,”
As I knew that Hans was well-connected in Amsterdam and in touch with real estate mafias, I did not have the courage to report this matter to the Dutch police authorities. The only option for me was to pack and leave immediately fearing for my life. “Though my air ticket was booked for the next day evening to London, I had it cancelled and purchased a ticket for the next available flight to London, which was in the early hours next day and left Amsterdam,” Shetty said. It did not stop with that, Hans continued to call and threaten me over phone while I was in London too, he added.
Shetty had written a detailed complaint to the Netherlands Ambassador in India and Indian Ambassador at The Hague, and to the Additional Secretary (Europe West Division), Ministry of External Affairs in New Delhi, about his harrowing experience at Amsterdam and has sought protection against Hans Mathijsen.