The Dutch love a good financial scandal and if that involves a colourful political figure so much the better. Masstricht's popular Mayor Gerd Leers, well-known for his liberal (and very practical) ideas about legalising the supply of marijuana, is in the spotlight today.

 

In 2006, he paid about 200,000 euros for a holiday villa in a Bulgarian development which was yet to be built. Almost immediately things started to go wrong, de Volkskrant tells us.

 

The house in a Black Sea resort, was ready much later than promised. Worse still, the whole project turned out to be collateral for a bank loan, meaning the villa he'd paid for wasn't technically his.

 

Mr Leers turned for help to the Bulgarian ambassador to the Netherlands. He also went on to have years of complicated dealings with both politicians and business figures in Bulgaria itself. The question is to what extent he used his position as a major Dutch political figure to help sort out his private financial problems.

 

An official report has now found that although he didn't actually break the law, he did breach council guidelines. It goes on to say that, although he always tried to draw a line between council and personal business, this was not always possible. It describes his behaviour as "clumsy and foolish".

 

Whether or not the mayor will now be voted out of office by the council remains to be seen. The paper ominously warns that only Mr Leers' own Christian Democrats are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Councillors from the other political parties are tabling questions about the affair and are likely to give him a bumpy ride over the next few days.

 

Today's De Telegraaf sports a front-page "exclusive" this morning that has everything for its mass-circulation readership. "Poch's daughter begs Máxima for help" reads the headline.

 

Julio Poch is the Transavia pilot arrested in Spain on charges of involvement in 'death flights' in the 1970s, when opponents of Argentina's Videla junta regime were thrown out of planes to their deaths. The Dutch-Argentinian citizen is facing extradition to Argentina. Máxima is the Dutch crown princess whose father, Jorge Zorreguieta, served as a minister in the Videla government.

 

Mr Poch's daughter has apparently written to the princess asking for her help in saving her father from spending the rest of his life in an Argentinian prison. She has, of course, stressed that both she and Princess Máxima have fathers who were involved with the government during the military dictatorship, the paper carefully fills us in.

 

In an interview, Mr Poch accuses the Dutch government of cutting a secret deal so that he would be arrested in Spain and not in the Netherlands. This, according to him, saved the royal family any potential embarrassment during judicial hearings when similarities could have been drawn between Mr Poch's past and that of the princess' father.

 

The photo on the front page of Trouw shows intrepid trekkers setting off in a bleak snow-bedecked landscape for a three-hour hike across the frozen Wadden Sea.

 

It sounds very dramatic but the Wadden Sea, at least where the hikers were, is at low tide really just a series of mudflats. However, with temperatures well under zero, the sea water has frozen and people came from throughout the Netherlands to experience walking on it, at least when the ice held.

 

As the paper says, there are enough people who find "plodding through slushy ice with a snowstorm in your face" enjoyable. About 500 people applied to join the organised treks but there was only room for around 180 of them. One participant likened the experience to "Napoleon's retreat from Russia".

 

From slushy ice to the perfect ice surface at the European allround skating championships at Hamar in Norway. Dutch speed skating star, Sven Kramer, won the 10,000 metres easily, clinching his fourth successive European title.

 

He left his opponents without a hope, his performance putting him in a class apart, crows today's nrc.next. He is the first skater to have won the European title four times in a row. "Going down in history, that's what I like," he told the paper confidently before his final race.

 

Under the article, there is an enormous photo of his feet after the 10,000 metres. To untutored eyes, they look perfectly normal if a little discoloured. The paper says perhaps the most important thing was to get through this last big race before the Vancouver Winter Olympics without getting injured. "There's a far more important contest in four weeks' time," he agreed.

 

"Balkenende's own front path still snowed up" tuts the AD's headline over a photo of Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende's snowy front garden. As recently as Friday, he was calling on us to do the decent thing and clear the snow and ice from in front of our houses.

 

Galvanising us to do our best he said: "It would be a good thing for people to clear in front of their houses. It's helpful to others and is also part of one's social responsibilities."