The Dutch National Bank (“DNB”) has long been in the comfortable position of being exempted from the Government Information Public Access Act (Wet openbaarheid van bestuur, “Wob”), the predecessor of the Open Government Act (Wet open overheid, “Woo”). The broad formulation of the exemption clause kept both confidential and non-confidential DNB information outside the scope of the Wob. This changed when the Woo was enacted; the DNB is no longer in a generic exceptional position. But the question is: how much does actually change?
Leon and Minke discussed this question in their note to the judgment of the Court of Amsterdam of 23 December 2025 [1] for the journal Jurisprudentie Onderneming & Recht. This judgment concerns a Woo request by the newspaper Het Financieele Dagblad (“FD”) to DNB for documents on crypto provider Bitvavo.
DNB as B body under the Woo
First of all, DNB is a private-law legal entity with a statutory task (known as a ‘B body’ in administrative law) rather than a public-law legal entity (such as the State or the municipalities). This means that DNB only falls under the Woo in as far as it exercises public authority.
Confidential supervisory information remains beyond the scope of the Woo
Besides, the Woo does not apply to confidential supervisory information. Section 8.8 Woo provides that the statutory provisions for disclosure on request do not apply to information that is subject to a statutory provision specified in the appendix to the Woo. For DNB, these include the confidentiality provisions in the Act on the Prevention of Money Laundering and Financing of Terrorism (“Wwft”), the Financial Supervision Act (“Wft”), and the Sanctions Act 1977.
What is included in confidential supervisory information?
In these proceedings, DNB refused to disclose part of the information requested, as it considered this to be confidential supervisory information.
FD argued that there can only be confidential supervisory information if DNB obtains or receives such information on account of its statutory task. According to FD, this does not include documents collected or drafted by DNB itself. FD relied on the text of Section 1:89 Wft and Section 22 Wwft, which mention confidential information that is “provided or obtained” or “received or obtained”, respectively
The Court did not follow this literal interpretation of the law. The Court gathered from the legislative history that the legislator intends to protect all confidential information that has been collected by the supervisor in the scope of its task. This may also concern information that DNB itself collects or generates.
What exactly is included in confidential supervisory information? Regarding this question, the Court referred to the Baumeister judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union.[2] This judgment implies that information is only confidential if it is not public and its disclosure is likely to affect adversely the interests of the party that provided that information or the interests of third parties, or the proper functioning of the monitoring system. Information on supervision methodologies and strategies may also be confidential.
Application to the documents
The Court then applied this framework to the two documents that FD and DNB disagreed on.
The first document contained a speaking line for DNB for handling requests from the media on recent developments in the crypto market. This document contained no data on individual companies, nor concrete information on supervision methodologies or strategies used by DNB. It was therefore not included in confidential supervisory information, which made the Woo applicable. That did not mean that the document had to be disclosed fully; one passage was allowed to remain undisclosed, since it dealt with a personal opinion on policy for internal consideration.
The Court arrived at a different conclusion on the second document, consisting of internal emails about a crypto provider under supervision. These emails clarified the way in which DNB exercises supervision. For that reason, the Court held that this was confidential supervisory information within the meaning of the Baumeister judgment, and therefore the Woo does not apply to that document.
What does this mean?
The judgment shows that the abolition of DNB’s generic exceptional position under the Woo does not mean that supervisory information will simply become public upon request from now on.
On the other hand, DNB cannot suffice by referring to its supervisory task in general; It will have to assess for each individual document whether the information actually falls under a special confidentiality clause. If it does not, the Woo applies and DNB has to substantiate concretely whether a Woo-based ground for exception prevents disclosure.
It is a different problem which court is competent to rule on Woo decisions of van DNB: the economic administrative court in Rotterdam or the general Woo court in Amsterdam? Remarkably enough, both courts consider themselves competent. We discussed this more elaborately in our note.
[1] Court of Amsterdam, 23 December 2025, ECLI:NL:RBAMS:2025:10528.
[2] ECJ 19 June 2018, ECLI:EU:C:2018:464.
