Beverwijk alderman dismissed after reports of verbally inappropriate behavior

Former parliamentarian Nevin Özütok was dismissed as alderman in Beverwijk on Thursday. Civil servants had complained that she had been guilty of verbally inappropriate behavior.

In a statement, the other members of the Beverwijk office of mayor and aldermen said that they could no longer work with Özütok. Beverwijk asked an agency to investigate the complaints.

Özütok said that she did not recognize herself in the image painted by the complaints and agreed to cooperate with the investigation. She called it “a bitter pill to swallow” that the office of mayor and aldermen had already decided to dismiss her.

“The office informed me that they do not want to wait for the process to be completed. I find this truly regrettable, and it does not do justice to the careful handling of complaints,” Özütok wrote on LinkedIn.

Özütok served in the Tweede Kamer, the lower house of the Dutch parliament, for GroenLinks in 2006 and from 2017 to 2021.