Cor Boonstra (

Leeuwarden Leeuwarden (; fy, Ljouwert, longname=yes /; Stadsfries dialects, Town Frisian: ''Liwwadden''; Leeuwarder dialect: ''Leewarden'') is a List of cities in the Netherlands by province, city and Municipalities of the Netherlands, municipality in Fri ...

, 7 January 1938) is mainly known as president of the Board of Directors of

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

(1996–2001).

Biography

At the age of 16, he quit his study at the Hogere burgerschool and started to work for

Unilever Unilever plc is a British multinational consumer goods company with headquarters in London, England. Unilever products include food, condiments, bottled water, baby food, soft drink, ice cream, instant coffee, cleaning agents, energy dri ...

. In 1974 he started to work for Sara Lee, where he ultimately became the president of the board of directors. On 31 December 1993 he withdrew from Sara Lee. In the beginning of 1994 he was asked by former Philips top executive Jan Timmer to participate in the Board of Directors of Philips, to breathe new life to the brand Philips. Boonstra was responsible for the 'Let's make things better'- campaign. Two years after his commencement of employment with Philips, Boonstra became the successor of Timmer as the president of the board of directors. He held this leading position until 2001. While Boonstra was in charge, the market-value of Philips increased fivefold mainly by focusing on short-term profits and selling off company units like BSO/Origin (now a part of

Atos Atos is a European multinational information technology (IT) service and consulting company headquartered in Bezons, France and offices worldwide. It specialises in hi-tech transactional services, unified communications, cloud, big data and ...

and record company PolyGram. During his leadership he moved the head office (the top 350 employees) of Philips from Eindhoven to

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

, the capital of the country. Since most of the regular staff remained in Eindhoven, the birthplace of the company, this move was not popular among Philips employees. In 2000 Boonstra was chosen 'top executive of the year'. Boonstra divorced two times, and has two children (Cor Boonstra and Roelof Boonstra) of his first wife. In 1998 Boonstra and his first wife barely survived a hijacking. At that time Boonstra already was having an affair with Sylvia Tóth. A few years later, Boonstra was accused of insider trading in which he allegedly earned several hundreds of thousands of euros by trading in Endemol shares (where Sylvia Tóth was a member of the board) just before that company was acquired by the Spanish

Telefónica Telefónica, S.A. () is a Spanish multinational telecommunications company headquartered in Madrid, Spain. It is one of the largest telephone operators and mobile network providers in the world. It provides fixed and mobile telephony, broadba ...

.''Tóth werd dag voor handel Boonstra ingelicht''
/ref> Boonstra was ultimately acquitted in court as no hard evidence existed that his partner Tóth had shared the information on the impending deal with him. The Dutch press referred to the inside deal as the "pillow talk deal". A few months later Cor Boonstra was again charged for not reporting trading in

Ahold Koninklijke Ahold N.V. was a Dutch multinational retail company based in Zaandam, Netherlands. It merged with Belgium-based Delhaize Group in 2016 to form Ahold Delhaize. History Growth in the Netherlands The company started in 1887, when A ...

shares where he himself was a member of the board. He was found guilty and charged a 135.000 euro fine.

References

* Encyclopedia,

Dutch Wikipedia The Dutch Wikipedia ( nl, Nederlandstalige Wikipedia) is the Dutch-language edition of the free online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. It was founded on 19 June 2001. As of , the Dutch Wikipedia is the -largest Wikipedia edition, with articles. It w ...

, Article Cor Boonstra, User Falcongj, added 2 January 2004, last edit 4 April 2009

External links

Philips Global
- access to worldwide local sites, research, consumer products, Healthcare, lighting etc.

Notes

{{DEFAULTSORT:Boonstra, Cor 1938 births Living people Dutch chief executives in the manufacturing industry Dutch chief executives in the technology industry Dutch chief executives in the food industry Dutch businesspeople Philips employees Chairmen of Philips Dutch corporate directors Unilever people People from Leeuwarden