Jean-Michel Nihoul

Michel Nihoul, a Brussels businessman and fraudster, was arrested in August 1996 in the investigation of Marc Dutroux and for years was held to be the man who connected Dutroux to a protected network. The Belgian parliamentary commission of inquiry into the Dutroux affair devoted a section of its 1998 report to "the relational network of M. Nihoul."¹

Record and Relations

The Brussels court of appeal sentenced Nihoul on May 6, 1976, to a year in prison for fraudulent bankruptcy and swindling. A Brussels commercial court declared him bankrupt on May 11, 1989, noting three earlier bankruptcies; its list of creditors included a doctor, convicted in Liège in 1981 of malversation at the Centre médical de l'Est, who had given Nihoul about five million francs, withdrawn in Switzerland, to bribe the judges of the court of appeal that was to hear his case. The bribe was not paid, the doctor received a heavier sentence on appeal, and Nihoul used the money, at least in part, to open the Brussels bar Le Clin d'Oeil. On December 30, 1996, he was sentenced to three years for swindling and embezzlement through the charity SOS Sahel, whose donations, the court found, had largely disappeared into his personal fortune.¹ Witnesses at his 2004 trial described him as an incorrigible swindler who organized sex parties and ran a fish business.²

From 1981 he was a client of a sex club at 145 rue des Atrébates in Etterbeek, whose clientele, the commission found, included people open to blackmail by Nihoul because of their professions or positions; when it closed in 1983 the same couple opened Le Dolo nearby, which Nihoul also frequented and which was shut in September 1996. The Dolo's operator organized two evenings with sex parties at the Château de Faulx-les-Tombes, then owned by the commune of Etterbeek, with the Etterbeek police keeping order outside; Nihoul took part, and in 1983 or 1984 he and his companion lived at the château for a month at the invitation of the mayor of Etterbeek. The commission called this "the perfect example" of a relaxation of norms "not only tolerated by public authorities, but even encouraged." It also placed him among the clients of the establishment at the center of the "cocaïne dorée" drug case of 1983 to 1985.¹

Through the Confrérie des Maîtres Brasseurs, the free radio Radio Activité, of which he was the driving force, and his firm J.-M. Nihoul et Associés, he cultivated politicians and officials and sold interventions for parole, pardons, prison leave and residence permits, for which he said he had earned about 500,000 francs; a magistrate appointed him a real estate expert without qualifications. With the suspended lawyer Annie Bouty and her Cadreco association he arranged residence papers for foreigners, among them Nigerians. The commission had indications that at the end of the 1980s he organized the political campaigns of several young lawyers who later faced disciplinary or criminal proceedings. It could not establish whether his ties to politicians were as close as he claimed, noting that he boasted of having "le bras long comme le Danube," and it found no substance in his claim to be protected by a Brussels investigating judge.¹

Informant

In 1995 and 1996 Nihoul was an informant of the gendarmerie's BSR in Dinant; the gendarmerie had registered him as a coded informant. In May 1995 he passed on information, obtained through Michel Lelièvre, about a stolen car and collected a 30,000-franc reward from the insurer Royale Belge; he later introduced Lelièvre to his handlers. The BSR took no action against Lelièvre in the first half of 1996, though he was wanted to serve a prison sentence and though, the commission found, there were indications that the BSR knew he and Dutroux had stolen a truck in 1995; Nihoul had asked his handler to leave Lelièvre alone. "In the end," the commission wrote, "it was the informant who directed his handlers and not the reverse." Its first report had listed eight indications of protection for Nihoul, among them witnesses who testified under oath that two associates from the entourage of a former minister protected him, and his hold as an informant over a policeman who failed to arrest Lelièvre before Lelièvre took part in the abductions of Sabine Dardenne and Laetitia Delhez. The commission concluded that "the Nihoul movement" had operated amid "the relaxation of norms and corrupting behavior" and in that sense had received and granted protection, "rarely in a very spectacular way and, most of the time, in the context of services between friends."¹

ASCO and the Dutroux Case

Achats Services Commerces (ASCO) was founded on July 2, 1991, at Wasmes by the operator of Le Dolo, Nihoul's companion and a third Dolo client, went into voluntary liquidation on June 23, 1995, and was declared bankrupt by the commercial court of Mons on October 9, 1995; Nihoul was at least its de facto manager in 1994, and the commission linked the company to the reports of white Mercedes cars.¹ He had met Dutroux a year before his arrest through Lelièvre, to whom he sold drugs. Michelle Martin told investigators that Dutroux had been in frequent contact with Nihoul around the abduction of Laetitia Delhez, and Dutroux said Nihoul was looking for girls for a Belgian prostitution network. Nihoul was led from the courthouse at Neufchâteau on August 16, 1996, to shouts of "à mort." His companion Marleen De Cokere was arrested in late September. His warrant in the Dutroux case was lifted in January 1997.³⁵ In an interview with Der Spiegel in 2001, in his two-room flat in Jette with De Cokere beside him, Nihoul said of children, "I never did anything with children. I love children," and that Dutroux had taken the girls "for his own consumption." The magazine reported that the investigation files showed Dutroux had asked his advice on getting into the trade in girls and that Nihoul had advised him to organize sadomasochistic parties, which Nihoul said he had understood to mean adults. He spoke of the group-sex parties he and De Cokere had organized, "but with style," attended by influential politicians and officials at Le Dolo and Faulx-les-Tombes, and said: "Ich habe die Regierung in der Hand" (I have the government in hand). For 20,000 marks more he offered "a sitting minister who is involved in a murder," and, for a six-figure sum, a photograph of the then Prince Albert with a naked sixteen-year-old taken on the second floor of the Mirano club twenty years earlier.⁶ Regina Louf, the witness X1, alleged that he organized parties at which children were abused; the prosecutors-general closed the files opened on her testimony in April 1998.⁷

At the trial in Arlon in 2004, Dutroux accused Nihoul of being his link to a ring kidnapping girls for prostitution, which Nihoul denied. Véronique Laurent, convicted of ordering the killing of her husband, Michel Piro, testified that Nihoul had come to their bar, La Terrasse, four or five times.⁸ Only seven of the twelve jurors found him guilty of the abductions, and the professional judges acquitted him of every charge connected with the children; on June 22, 2004, he was sentenced to five years for drug trafficking and criminal association. He left Saint-Gilles prison on parole on April 28, 2006, and retired with his companion to the Belgian coast, where he died on October 23, 2019.³⁴