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German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte secretly agreed to accept hundreds of thousands of refugees from Turkey each year as part of an EU-Turkey deal but did not inform other EU leaders, a book by a German journalist says.

The two European leaders met with then Turkish Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to discuss the details of the EU-Turkey refugee deal in private the night before the EU-Turkey summit in March 2016. The details of the secret trilateral meet where the deal was struck, has been revealed in a new book, ‘Driven by Events: Merkel’s Refugee Policy,’ by Robin Alexander, a journalist with Die Welt.

During the meeting, Merkel, and Rutte, who held the rotating EU presidency at that time as the Dutch PM, agreed on all the major provisions of the future EU-Turkey agreement which was later presented at the summit as a spontaneous Turkish initiative.