Bankruptcy trustees often keep on-line shops running even though the companies behind them have gone bust, and therefore cannot deliver the goods.
Last week, Webwereld reported about at least three on-line stores that kept taking orders and payments even after they had gone bankrupt. Trade association ICTWaarborg had already sounded the alarm about this last year, but notices the problem continues unabated. According to the trade org, trustees in bankruptcies should shut down the on-line stores as part of their jobs.
In the Netherlands, the trustee in bankruptcy is the one who gets their salary by skimming the property off the top, and is often a lawyer appointed by their law school buddy, the judge. As you can see, absolutely no conflict of interest could possibly take place there.
From what I understand, people can only get money back from a trustee (curator in Dutch) when there has been an ‘undeniable mistake‘. The article I link to tells of a case where somebody wanted to wire money to party A, but accidentally wired it to party B who had just been declared bankrupt. That is considered an undeniable mistake, because the party making the payment had never intended to pay the bankrupt party.

Embedding is a form of publication, and therefore infringement if it happens without permission, Dutch judges Brandenburg, Huijbers-Koopman and Struik concluded two weeks ago in an infringement case. Oddly enough, their judgement seems to hinge on the court’s conclusion (
Hans Bauer from Groningen must remove 5,000 books from his home, after a court agreed with housing corporation Patrimonium last Tuesday that his library constitutes a fire hazard.
I just turned away from the lock-picking talk, as the tent was absolutely packed (me being 5 minutes late). I don’t know how many people fit in these convention tents, hundreds, perhaps thousands, but that is the amount of people that after tonight may know how to break every lock you own.
If the case of car dealer Zwartepoort against website Miljoenhuizen.nl has been in the news before, it can only have been as the sort of easily mocked example of how some folks start lawsuits over really anything and everything, no matter how trivial and unwinnable their cases are. But now Zwartepoorte have gone and won theirs. When you searched Google for the company name, you would get amongst others a result from Miljoenhuizen.nl seemingly explaining the car dealer had gone bankrupt. You know the type:
A judge in Haarlem ruled last month that acupuncturists who are also certified Doctors of Medicine qualify for a tax exemption that other acupuncturists must miss out on,