A Dutch businessman should be jailed for 21 months for bribing a Google executive, the public prosecution department told judges in Zwolle on Monday.

Former TCN Groep boss Rudy Stroink and his wife are charged with paying €1.7m in bribes, as well as money laundering and fraud to attract Google to a data centre in Eemshaven.

The transactions took place between July 2008 and March 2010 when Stroink was head of property firm TCN, which was in financial trouble. Stroink is said to have paid the money to former Google director Simon Tusha, whose job was to negotiate contracts with data centres around the world.

Stroink told the court on the first day of the hearing last week, that he had been fooled by Tusha. He said he had not been aware that any of the consultants’ fee he had paid to a middle man who carried out the negotiations had been made over to Tusha via the Dominican Republic and the Bahamas.

However, Tusha admitted in court in the US in 2016 he had received some $3.2 million in kickbacks from companies in Britain and the Netherlands who were negotiating contracts for data centres with Google.

The court case focuses on a smaller data centre owned by TCN, not the new centre in Eemshaven which Google itself has built.