Afrojack and Tiësto – Credit: Mauricio Santana/Getty Images; Prince Williams/WireImage
One day after the 2024 presidential election last November, Grammy-winning EDM DJ-producer Tiësto — more used to pulsating lights and throbbing music than the drab, featureless walls of a courtroom — unassumingly took the stand at a federal courthouse in White Plains, New York.
“My stage name is Tiësto,” he said after spelling out his legal name, T-i-j-s V-e-r-w-e-s-t. “I picked [it] because I want to sound Italian [and] that sounds cooler as a DJ.”
More from Rolling Stone
He was there to testify against Frank Butselaar, his former tax adviser who prosecutors claim helped conceal tens of millions of dollars in an international tax scheme that preyed on Tiësto, fellow EDM DJ Afrojack, and other stars’ naivete.
Eight days later, Butselaar would plead guilty to one count of aiding or assisting in the filing of a false or fraudulent tax return. “On or about Jan. 20, 2015, I willfully added and assisted in the filing of a material false tax return for Nick van de Wall, also known as Afrojack, for the tax year 2013,” Butselaar told the court.
Speaking to the court, Butselaar and others working on the return agreed that it “would be filed without including overseas income that we knew should have otherwise been reported.”
Neither Tiësto nor Afrojack were charged in the case. (Reps for Afrojack and Tiësto declined to comment on Butselaar or the trial.) If anything, they were victims of Butselaar’s financial hijinks, going along with his bad advice because of their admitted bewilderment about financial matters.
But his trial lifted the veil on the murky world of international celebrity accounting, describing the tools that superstars’ teams may employ to lower their tax liability as much as possible.
Three months later, in early February, Butselaar, 65, would shuffle into Judge Cathy Seibel’s courtroom, sporting tangerine jail scrubs and ankle chains. He was balding and bespectacled, sporting the thinning arms of many a sixty-something man.
Seibel sentenced him to 30 months for his role in filing a “materially false” U.S. tax return for Afrojack in 2013. Butselaar, who has been in custody since his mid-2023 arrest in Italy, will likely be released in six months due to time he has already spent behind bars.
“It’s not Bernie Madoff,” Seibel said during sentencing, but it’s “70 million in unreported income.”
“He seemed very professional and [knew] what he was doing.”
Tiësto
WHEN VERWEST MET BUTSELAAR around 15 years ago, Butselaar had already developed a reputation in the Netherlands as a financial adviser to the stars, owing to his skill with complex corporate structures that could cut their tax bills.
Born 12 miles outside Amsterdam to a father in the book-publishing business and a mother who worked in fashion, Butselaar was, according to court papers filed by his defense attorneys, an “independent and self-possessed” child. He landed a spot in a highly rated school and discovered a love of field hockey that led to international competition.
He started working as a tax-lawyer trainee in college and was hired full-time after graduating. Over the next two decades, he learned about international property rights during his work with a pharmaceutical company. He eventually switched gigs to a U.S.-based white-shoe law firm, where he worked with entertainment outfits, including two Dutch TV production companies. According to court papers filed by his lawyers, he “navigated different taxation systems, [becoming] well-versed in the complexities and pitfalls of earning international income.”
He took it on himself to properly advise clients in industries that were known to exploit their workers — like entertainment and fashion, his lawyers said.
“He seemed very professional and [knew] what he was doing,” Verwest testified, according to a court transcript. “And I clearly had no idea about taxes or any of that.”
During this initial meeting in Verwest’s office in his hometown of Breda, Netherlands, Verwest testified that Butselaar delivered an alluring pitch: “The basic rule was that I had to stay under a certain amount of days [in any one country], and then I would pay normal tax.”
“If I went over the amount of days, then I would become a U.S. resident and pay taxes on my worldwide income in the U.S.”
Butselaar was hired. He ultimately set up a convoluted corporate structure for the performer. Per federal prosecutors, Butselaar instructed Verwest to launch a U.S. company called LA All the Way for his American income, which would be reported to the IRS.
Butselaar also directed Tiësto to create companies based in Cyprus and the island of Guernsey, which received his non-U.S. touring income and money from his “name and likeness rights,” respectively; both entities paid him salaries. At Butselaar’s advice, Tiësto ultimately set up “Safe From Harm,” a trust in Guernsey that owned the two other companies.
“The goal was to protect my assets if something crazy would happen during a show [like] something fall from the air or somebody gets injured with lawsuits,” he explained of the trust setup.
“What was your understanding of the source of the money that was going into the Safe From Harm trust between 2012 and 2017?”
“It would be the income from Cyprus.”
Butselaar told him that it was normal to have a trust for money, to “put it somewhere safe,” Tiësto recalled. “I mean, the Queen of England had a trust … lots of people have trusts, so I didn’t think anything weird about it.
This setup ran without incident until 2012. At a sit-down with his tax and finance advisers, Tiësto learned that because he had stayed in the U.S. too many days, his global income — what was pouring into the trust — would be subject to American taxes.
Butselaar proposed that Tiësto could avoid this by having his name taken off as the trust’s beneficiary, so it wouldn’t look like he owned this money.
Why did he trust Butselaar so much with his U.S. taxes, prosecutors asked.
“He knew a lot more about it than I did. For me, it was all new. This guy is known for knowing everything about taxes, so I was like, ‘You deal with it, and it’s all good, whatever you say.’“
“How much were you spending on the preparation of your taxes?”
“One minute … I had no idea how to do that stuff, so I just thought I hired professionals to help me with that. And I thought I had the whole team in place for whatever I needed.”
Butselaar had another great idea: the “taxes world tour.”
“We talked about it over the years that at the end, if I wanted money out of the trust, as a reset button, to make everything dissolve and come back to me, we should do a world tour,” the DJ testified. Tiësto and his team agreed that he “would not live anywhere and stay under the days in U.S., and I could put that money all in my personal account.”
Everything seemed copacetic until 2018. That year, Tiësto’s U.S. advisers told him there was a problem with how his trust was set up. He’d have to report the offshore structure to the IRS for his 2017 taxes.
But Butselaar told him everything was fine and that he didn’t need to report the offshore structure, despite what Tiësto’s team said. Tiësto believed him.
Besides, “there was no time to do anything else” before the filing deadline, the DJ testified.
“I would have the TV on pretty loud because I like to be distracted, especially when there [are] people in suits talking to me about this stuff I have not been educated for.”
Afrojack
AFROJACK, BORN NICK VAN DE WALL, took the stand on Nov. 7, and his testimony was largely similar to Tiësto’s. The Grammy-winning hitmaker, who’s collaborated with Beyoncé, Madonna, and Pitbull, explained that he was intent on saving as much on taxes as possible and throughout his testimony evinced an almost comical level of cluelessness about important business matters. Federal prosecutors said that Butselaar “implemented an offshore structure for [Afrojack] that mirrored the structure he created for Verwest.”
Van de Wall said he met Butselaar around 2010 or 2011. He’d been told that Butselaar also handled Tiësto’s “business stuff” and texted his colleague about it. “Tijs literally said ‘Frank is top … he’s amazing.’”
In spring 2012, one of van de Wall’s advisers told him that he should emigrate to the U.S., since he was spending so little time in the Netherlands. As with Butselaar’s plan for Tiësto, companies would be set up in Cyprus and Guernsey to help van de Wall lower his taxes.
“The major question you have to ask yourself is the following,” the adviser emailed the DJ. “You can save a lot of taxes, but it requires major and strict sacrifices, verifiable departure from the Netherlands.”
Van de Wall didn’t have a problem emigrating from the Netherlands if he could come back for a large chunk of time every year, saying in an email: “I want to continue with the plans of setting up a company on Cyprus, or some other kind of nonsense, but I don’t want to become homeless or telephone-less now.”
“I think that I had a phone number, which was, in my opinion, very cool, it had 34567 in it, and I want to keep that,” van de Wall elaborated. “And the other thing that I had in the back of my mind is that if my mom would get sick, or my grandma would get sick, I would still be able to visit as necessary.”
His adviser suggested a meeting with Butselaar that spring to go over tax plans, though van de Wall admits he was not fully mentally invested in business meetings.
“I would have the TV on pretty loud because I like to be distracted, especially when there is three people in suits talking to me about this stuff I have not been educated for,” he said. “This is how most of the business meetings went.”
Butselaar emailed that Afrojack needed to pay 17,500 euros to set up the Guernsey trust. Another business adviser asked Afrojack whether to authorize this payment.
Afrojack replied: “Make me disappear.”
“So when we were talking about everything, one of the things that came up is because I didn’t live anywhere and because I was moving around constantly, technically, I wasn’t living anywhere,” van de Wall said.
The business setups would reflect this. “So that’s why on paper, I would disappear. I would become someone that doesn’t live anywhere. At least that was the assumption I made, at that time, so I thought it was a funny way to say, ‘let’s go.’”
Did he understand the structure of these companies?
“Nope.”
Did he care what they’d be doing?
“No.”
“Why not?” the prosecutor asked.
“Beyond my understanding,” he said. “Even though it’s a business that benefits me, it’s not a business that I am running myself.”
Over the next few years, van de Wall enjoyed the lifestyle expected of an EDM hitmaker. “I would buy a car. I would drive it for a year and then buy a flashier car,” he said. “I like [sports] cars a lot. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Maybachs.”
His managers never had an “intervention” to address his spending habits, even though he testified it “might have been very necessary looking back at it now.”
“The most important thing for my manager[s] at the time was, ‘If he’s happy touring, everyone is getting paid, so just let him tour,’ even though I think eventually [I was] not making any money.”
There were management costs, attorney fees, agency percentages, and taxes he wasn’t aware of. At some point, van de Wall spent around 2 or 3 million dollars on private jets per year. “I did not know about withholding tax until maybe seven years ago.”
Butselaar did criticize van de Wall’s spending in February 2013 — over a red Ferrari 458 he’d bought as a company purchase. “I bought a car, and I crashed it within 35 minutes of picking it up,” Afrojack said.
“Unfortunately, even a Ferrari cannot be considered an investment for a private company, as it is written off quickly. I wasn’t kidding when I suggested to register the car accident in [his mother’s] name,” Butselaar wrote in an email. “I was being serious. The reality is that one is standing out with a Ferrari and one tends to drive too fast, which is not so bad in itself, but, unfortunately, the tax authorities keep in close contact with [law enforcement].”
Butselaar wrote it was “regrettable” the accident got so much play in the media and on social media — and that the tow-truck driver gave a radio interview. “Next time, give the guy 500 euros and a T-shirt with your signature to keep him quiet,” Butselaar said in an email.
Around the same time, van de Wall had another problem: He had spent too many days in America the prior year, meaning his global earnings were subject to U.S. taxes.
Van de Wall had this same problem in 2013, so Butselaar decided to make the performer’s mother the “sole on-paper beneficiary” to conceal that it was his own money. This, Butselaar said, meant that van de Wall’s global income “will not be subject to American taxation despite the fact that [van de Wall] spent too many days in the U.S. in 2013.” Butselaar told the DJ’s team to file taxes that omitted his non-U.S. money.
IN THEIR SENTENCING RECOMMENDATION, prosecutors contended that Butselaar was an “unrepentant and sophisticated fraudster” whose misdeeds were revealed in March 2018, when Dutch authorities’ criminal investigation into him became public. (Tiësto fired Butselaar after the probe came to light; the adviser and Afrojack also parted ways.)
The defense approached prosecutors about a plea deal after seeing evidence showing that Butselaar illegally changed a trust document. They made an “emotionally laden” pitch to prosecutors — Butselaar was 65, and had a pending criminal case in the Netherlands. Both sides’ argument at Butselaar’s sentencing echoed their filings.
Prosecutors told Seibel that the maximum permitted sentence of 36 months was necessary so that tax professionals would “think twice” before engaging in similar behavior.
Butselaar’s lawyer said that he had suffered enough and implored Seibel to release him so he could return home to the Netherlands and his family. If he were sentenced to more time, Butselaar could wind up in the Metropolitan Detention Center, a notorious federal jail in Brooklyn that’s currently housing Sean Combs, Sam Bankman-Fried, and Luigi Mangione, and have to “deal with the myriad of horrors” there.
“Mr. Butselaar’s life as he knew it is in complete ruins,” defense attorney Kerry Lawrence said. When he does go home, he’ll have “no home and no money and no career and no pride and a tarnished reputation.” And while Butselaar languishes in lockup, “Tiësto is going to be performing, and Afrojack is going to be performing.”
During the proceeding, Butselaar was not particularly emotional. He answered Seibel’s questions with quiet “yes your honor”s, but did not himself make a pitch for leniency, as most defendants do.
At various times during the two-hour sentencing, he rested his chin on his hand. After Seibel handed down the sentence, he stood and shook his lawyers’ hands. Butselaar exchanged hugs before being escorted out of court.
Seibel did show Butselaar empathy despite her sentence. Recognizing that the federal Bureau of Prisons was a “disaster” poised to worsen, Seibel directed his return to Westchester County Jail, keeping him out of MDC for the time being.
Best of Rolling Stone
Sign up for RollingStone’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
