An unemployed Belgian woman who says she ‘forgot’ To her trip to Spain for 5 years is to be reimbursed the equivalent of nearly CA$50,000 for speech wrongly received.
A woman from Profondeville, in the Belgian province of Namur, who has been traveling to Tenerife, an island in Spain, since 2017 continued to receive unemployment benefits from the National Employment Organization (ONEM), according to Belgian media.
“She hadn’t registered a vehicle in Belgium since 2012 and made most of her expenses in Tenerife. She rarely returned to visit her parents or, in her own words, to go for job interviews,” the labor inspectorate said.
The woman, for her part, would have defended herself by pointing out that she had spent a “long vacation” on the island, where she had met a man. So she “forgot” to explain everything to Onem, the Belgian media continued.
The unemployed woman was asked to repay the 33,500 euros, the equivalent of almost 50,000 Canadian dollars, that she had wrongfully received since 2017.
She was also fined 4,800 euros – more than $7,000 – by the Criminal Court of Namur.