Chair of TU Delft’s Supervisory Board steps down with immediate effect

Collot d’Escury took the decision not to complete his first term as Chair of the Supervisory Board of TU Delft. He will stop directly, while his appointment is due to run until 1 July 2025.

An email that the Executive Board sent to all staff on Friday afternoon 28 February states that he wishes to avoid ‘any appearance of a conflict of interest’ with his partnership with the Roland Berger consultancy firm. The message links the current and future projects of TU Delft in Rotterdam with the ‘convergence’ of interdisciplinary research and the preparations for creating a TU Delft campus in that city.

Valorisation

Collot d’Escury took office as Chair of the Supervisory Board on 1 July 2021 as the successor of the former Shell CEO Jeroen van der Veer. He was then already a partner at Roland Berger.

In that same year, the consultancy firm published a report entitled Valorisatie Ontketend (valorisation unleashed, in Dutch) in which Collot d’Escury’s colleagues argue for innovation in physical ‘ecosystems’ of companies, knowledge institutions, and other organisations. The report praised the Erasmus Smart Health Tech Campus on the grounds of the Erasmus Medical Centre.

The Executive Board message suggests that Roland Berger is still interested in these sorts of developments. It implies a potential partnership in the future. ‘With the concretisation of the convergence strategy and the development of Campus Rotterdam, it will no longer be possible to combine the role of chair of the Supervisory Board with his position as Managing Partner of Roland Berger.’ In light of the major cutbacks at TU Delft, many staff members are questioning if the project should actually be put on hold. The Works Council recently raised its financial feasibility for discussion and insisted that no more money be spent on expensive research.

Metadata

At the beginning of December 2024, Delta questioned the possible conflict of interest with Roland Berger. The reason for doing this was the Development Plan for the campus in Rotterdam that the Executive Board had adpoted at the end of November. The metadata of that document contains the author’s name of a Roland Berger staff member. Wasn’t it remarkable that this very agency wrote a plan on a subject that so clearly falls under the central TU Delft strategy?

But things turned out to be different. It was only the format of a Roland Berger staff member that was used for the report. The content itself was written by the organisation behind the programme. As it turned out, the format had previously been used in a job that Roland Berger had done for the organisers about ‘support centred around advising on the financial process’: ‘identifying the funding options and creating a funding plan’.  Rotterdam Campus will be financed through several hundreds of millions of euros worth of external subsidies. The question is where that money will be found.

EUR 200,000 tender

TU Delft did not see any problem with potential conflicts of interest in this task, was the answer of a spokesperson to the questions posed at the beginning of December. After all, the job was not issued by the Executive Board (that falls directly under the Supervisory Board), but by the project organisation. Furthermore, the relevant procedures were followed as a tender was put out to several companies and was checked by the Procurement Department. The job, which was worth about EUR 200,000, was then assigned to Roland Berger. The spokesperson said that it was the only job that the consultancy did in the project, and one that ‘should be earned back in the lobbying strategy’.

In 2023, the Inspectorate of Education had also assessed the relationship between Roland Berger and TU Delft. It is generally known that the Inspectorate looked into the lack of social safety at TU Delft. Its conclusion was written in a devastating report in March 2024. Less well known is the fact that the Inspectorate also examined TU Delft’s finances. The examination included four assignments that had gone to Roland Berger in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022. The Inspectorate determined (in Dutch) that nothing inappropriate had happened (page 93). The overseer had not influenced anybody and furthermore, another branch of the company than where he worked was involved.

Social safety

Collot d’Escury had studied Chemical Technology at TU Delft and among his various positions was Board Member of The Delft University Fund. He was also involved in the Graduate Entrepreneur, a partnership for start-ups of students from TU Delft and Rotterdam, from the start, and was a co-founder of the Excellence Fund which brings international academics to TU Delft.

In the Executive Board’s announcement, he says that he fulfilled his role of Supervisory Board Chair with ‘much pleasure and dedication’. He also says that ‘It was a period in which much happened’. He refers to the pioneering role of TU Delft in the areas of technical innovations, the campus strategy, convergence and social safety.

Under fire

In terms of that last point, Collot d’Escury and his colleagues came under fire several times over the last year. The Inspectorate of Education deemed that the Supervisory Board had not taken sufficient action to ensure the social safety of staff. It accused the Board of having a ‘minimal information infrastructure’, could have ‘shown greater effort’, and made itself more accessible to staff members.

When the Supervisory Board and the Executive Board cast doubts on the methodology of the Inspectorate and threatened to take them to court, they received a flood of criticism from both inside and outside TU Delft. A couple of months later there was a letter from the Minister of Education who reminded the Supervisory Board of its duties. ‘The Executive Board takes action, and as the internal regulatory body and employer, the Supervisory Board should maintain a critical distance from the Executive Board. I will continue to check this and may address you on this.’

Collot d’Escury stood squarely behind the Executive Board the whole time. “We have full confidence in the Executive Board,” he said to Delta at the end of June. He saw that the Executive Board was ‘serious’ and, with help, was working on self-reflection and behaviour change, which the Minister had asked for. He asked for patience as “It takes time for changes in leadership and culture to be visible”.

Succession

In January, it was announced that the entire Executive Board would leave. And earlier this week the Supervisory Board publicised the plan about a phased approach to install a new Executive Board. Collot d’Escury will not be involved in this anymore. The Executive Board says that the procedure for his successor has started.

It will also be announced shortly who will succeed Vice Chair Luc Soete. His second term of office on the Supervisory Board ends on 1 May. On 1 January 2025 Heleen Wachters was reappointed for a second term of four years. Manon Van Beek and Paul Verhagen are both in their first term of office until 1 April 2027 and 1 September 2027 respectively.