Can you provide more detail?
Usually grants/projects etc in research in Europe explicitly budget "overheads" as a separate budget line. The size ove the overhead varies between the different funding instruments, but are usually between 20% and 100% of the direct costs (mostly wages). Universities will have internal regimes that distribute the overheads between the central administration, for covering such things as office space, heating, shared services etc., and the research group in which the research takes place for covering computing, office supplies, local admin, travels, publication consumables etc.
So for example a 2 year project that has 120K allocated in direct cost salary, with a 75% overhead regime in a university with a 25% central overhead take would have an overall budget of 210K of which 120K would end up payed as salary to the researchers, 52.5K taken by central administration, and 37.5K taken by the research group.
While technically you could argue paying researchers more would also net the university more money, asthe overheads are calculated as a % on direct costs, in reality this does not hold as funding for research is very finite and funding agencies would not approve paying higher project grants.
Both universities and large businesses have been successfully lobbying for years for higher overhead % regimes in grant instruments, and since the budget for funding research has not changed in line with these evolutions, defaco shifting the windfalls of research grants from the researcher's wages to the administrations.