Less than 24 hours after Donald Pols, who served as General Director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands until last month, officially began his new role as Sustainability Director at Tata Steel, his employment came to an abrupt end. On Tuesday, 2 June, the steelmaker announced that it was terminating Pols’ contract with immediate effect after new information about his past came to light—information that, according to Tata Steel, had not previously been disclosed to the company.

The trigger was a revelation published by the Dutch newspaper NRC concerning Pols’ student years in South Africa. Research by historian Anne-Lot Hoek indicates that in the early 1990s, Pols chaired the Afrikaner Student Front (ASF), a far-right student organisation that opposed the abolition of apartheid and campaigned against Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC). According to NRC, Pols played a prominent role in the movement for a few years, beginning at the age of 19.

For Tata Steel’s board, the fact that this information had not been shared with the company was sufficient reason to end its relationship with Pols immediately.

“Reprehensible”

Pols has acknowledged his involvement with the organisation. In comments to NRC, he described the views he held at the time as “reprehensible” and said he looks back on that period with shame. According to Pols, he was a young student raised in a conservative and isolated environment who became caught up in the turbulent political climate of the era.

“I am in no way the person I was back then,” he stated.

The revelations come at a particularly sensitive moment. For years, Pols was one of the most visible leaders of the Dutch environmental movement. As director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands, he spearheaded campaigns against major industrial emitters and became closely associated with one of the most high-profile climate lawsuits in Dutch history: the case against Shell.

In 2021, under his leadership, Friends of the Earth Netherlands secured a historic court ruling requiring Shell to reduce its emissions more rapidly. Although the decision was later overturned on appeal, the case cemented Pols’ reputation as one of the country’s most influential climate activists.

Political Storm

It was precisely this reputation that made Pols’ move to Tata Steel, announced last month, so controversial. After years of pressuring large industrial polluters, he accepted a position at a company that Friends of the Earth Netherlands had frequently described as one of the country’s biggest polluters.

The environmental organisation reacted unusually harshly. It stated that it had “no understanding” for Pols’ decision and immediately severed ties with its former director. For many supporters, the move felt like a defection to the opposite side of the debate.

Friends of the Earth Already Knew

The timing of the revelations has therefore become a matter of controversy in its own right. Hardly had the debate over Pols’ departure subsided when the NRC article appeared, instantly rendering his position at Tata Steel untenable. The sequence of events has inevitably fuelled speculation about the timing of the disclosure and who may have had an interest in bringing the information into the public domain.

Pols told NRC that he had long feared his student past would eventually resurface. He also claimed that several individuals who were aware of his history had attempted to blackmail him on multiple occasions.

According to Pols, one such blackmail attempt prompted him to inform the then-Chair of the Board of Friends of the Earth Netherlands five years ago. The organisation subsequently decided not to take any action regarding the information.