Former top civil servant Arthur Docters van Leeuwen died in the night from Friday to Saturday at the age of 75, reports the WE Sunday. He would have been ill for quite some time.
Docters van Leeuwen was a lawyer and senior civil servant at, among others, the Ministries of the Interior and Finance. In 1989 he was appointed head of the Internal Security Service, the predecessor of the current AIVD.
In 1995, Docters van Leeuwen started as chair of the Board of Attorneys General of the Public Prosecution Service, where he was fired in 1998 after a conflict with then Minister of Justice Winnie Sorgdrager.
Subsequently, between 1999 and 2007 he was active as chairman of the board of the Netherlands Authority for the Financial Markets. Uri Rosenthal, former Minister of Foreign Affairs and good friend, describes Docters van Leeuwen against the WE as “exceptionally intelligent and erudite”.
The former top civil servant was a member of D66 for twenty years, after which he made the political switch to the VVD in 2002. Originally he had also run for the House of Representatives elections of 2006, but he withdrew because he found tenth place on the electoral list too low.
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