A convicted robber in the Netherlands has been allowed to deduct the cost of his pistol from the money he must pay back to the victim of his crime. The 46-year-old man sentenced for armed robbery can deduct the 2,000 Euros he paid for the weapon from the 6,600 he must repay the bank he robbed. This is akin to applying U.S Federal Tax Exemtions to Criminal Activities. If O.J. could have produced a 20 million dollar receipt for a butcher knife, after he was found liable for killing his wife, he could have claimed "Well, I've already paid for this because of the costs incurred to buy the murder weapon." Makes my head spin just thinking about how this can be applied.

AMSTERDAM — It is often said that crime doesn't pay, but a Roermond man might beg to differ, having recently been refunded EUR 2,000 for the pistol he used to commit an armed robbery.

In sentencing the 46-year-old man to four years jail last week, Breda Court also ordered him to repay the EUR 6,600 he stole from a bank in the Brabant town of Chaam. But the man had the price of the pistol he bought for the robbery deducted from the amount he was forced to repay.

The director of the public prosecution's dispossession division, Gerard Sta, said it is possible for criminals to have the cost incurred in committing a crime deducted from their sentences, newspaper De Telegraaf reported on Monday.

A spokeswoman for the Breda public prosecutor's office confirmed De Telegraaf's report to Expatica on Monday.

Sta said the costs must have a direct relationship to the criminal offence, and be costs that a criminal otherwise would not have incurred. "A second condition is that the criminal offence must be carried out," Sta said.

He said the law stipulates that the financial situation of the bank robber after the sentence is imposed must be the same as what it was prior to the crime. "It sounds a little bit strange, but that is the law," he said.

Another example would be the costs a criminal incurs in a cannabis plantation. If the plantation is seized by police, the criminal can identify to authorities what costs were incurred in setting up the crop and gain compensation.

Ironically, Dutch Foreign Minister Ben Bot announced on Monday that he would work this year to counter the image of the Dutch as "whore-mongering, coke-snorting child murderers" — a description uttered by a commentator on Fox News recently.