Booking.com to repay €65M Dutch State aid after €28M in bonuses for 3 US execs | Hacker News Reader

Booking.com to repay €65M Dutch State aid after €28M in bonuses for 3 US execs

nltimes.nl

321 pointsthe-dude156 comments

Similar conversation happening in Canada (but no repayment):

"Bloc Québécois MP Xavier Barsalou-Duval put forward the motion, which states “that this House condemn the decision of senior management of Air Canada to pay themselves $20 million in executive bonuses when they’re received $6 billion in public assistance.”

Air Canada informed shareholders on Monday that its top executives and managers were getting a combined $10 million in stock options and bonuses for their response to the COVID-19 pandemic."

https://globalnews.ca/news/7918875/air-canada-executive-bonu...

But that's 1/300 of the amount of aid they received spent on exec bonuses.

In the booking.com case it's almost half the amount of aid spent on exec bonuses

The issue is (only slightly) more nuanced: while the executives collected bonuses, they did go for a few months without pay and their overall bonus' for 2020 were lower than in previous years.

It does reveals the reality of our managerial class--in a sort of distributed, quasi-feudalism they are entitled (legally and practically) to extract massive amounts of wealth from large corporate entities regardless of any negative impact on the company.

- Running the business into the ground (Target Canada)

- Running the business into the ground while underfunding the company pension (Sears)

- Lobbying for billions of dollars of tax dollars while cutting thousands of jobs (Bombardier, Air Canada)

They promised to protect jobs and no bonuses in return for state aid.

That's exactly what they didn't do. They laid off 5000 people and got bonuses.

But giving the money back now would bankrupt the company, which no government would do. And since the people involved are powerful donors, no politician will even mention holding the people responsible.

If a company has almost has no employees, then why help with state aid?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_carrier

Air Canada/France/whatever is not just a company. It's an important aspect of globalisation and the country whose flag it carries treats it as such. Transformation into a formal corporation is usually a ploy to make it cost effective. And, in many countries, is only partial, often resulting in the worst of both worlds.

If a company receives federal aid, or their employees receive federal aid due to low pay ex Walmart in the US, they should have to cap payouts. Maybe based on a ratio to the lowest paid employee or federal minimum wage. Make execs lobby to raise the minimum wage so they can increase their bonus or something.

In the netherlands, it was mentioned for "no bonuses" as part of the agreement/state aid.

I believe the article clarifies this - the "no bonuses" rule didn't exist when Booking.com claimed this aid.

The rule existed for the second tranche of aid, which Booking didn't claim.

The fact that that even needed to be specified was pretty bad, the money was clearly earmarked for companies to spend on their regular employees to avoid lay-offs. Booking paying it out to their execs was absolutely mis-appropriation in every sense of the word, and only absolutely massive backlash here and significant talk of boycotts, including on national TV, is what turned them around on this.

No doubt;

Nonetheless, this is business as usual.

Booking.com are masters of tax avoidance and I'd guess all of their usual bonuses are essentially covered by Dutch state aid in the form of reduced taxes.

They were misleading the government.

> Het niet uitkeren van bonussen was overigens door het ministerie van Financiën niet als harde eis vastgelegd in de voorwaarden voor de NOW-regeling waar Booking gebruik van maakte. Hoekstra had simpelweg de Kamer laten weten dat het “niet de tijd voor het toekennen en uitkeren van bonussen” is. Wel een harde eis was dat ontvangers van de staatssteun ten minste drie maanden lang niemand mochten ontslaan. Booking hield zich hier exact drie maanden aan, direct erop volgde een reorganisatie waarbij bijna 26.000 mensen hun baan verloren. Dit betrof ook zo’n duizend mensen op het kantoor in Amsterdam, de meesten van hen maakten gebruik van een vrijwillige vertrekregeling.

Correction: I understand it to be a quarter of staff (the total staff being 26000). So the article is pretty grossly wrong in an important and obvious detail. Not sure how much I'd trust it on the more nuanced but.

(Former booking employee here, but not for several years)

Correct. But it was 5000 in Amsterdam and 26k worldwide.

"The bonuses, meant to offset the salary cuts the management team took in 2020, were distributed while the company was calling for a bailout from Ottawa. The government agreed to the package on several strict terms, including guaranteed refunds for customers and a cap on executive pay.

But the terms of the deal do not apply retroactively. Moving forwards, under the bailout agreement, executive compensation at Air Canada must be capped at $1 million per year until all government loans are repaid."

The government did cap the salaries, I've not done any super deep research but from the articles I've read, I've not been able to figure out how this was allowed.. except this article that mentions that they're not applied retroactively, and that the payout was because the exec team went without salary. Not totally clear in the Canadian press how the whole thing actually panned out at the end of the day. (fwiw: I didn't post my original comment as an opinion on the situation, only that a similar conversation is happening in the Canadian press. :))

https://www.thestar.com/business/2021/06/01/air-canada-paid-....

My understanding is that the bonuses were paid out in the final stages of the negotiations for the bailout package.

> Maybe based on a ratio to the lowest paid employee or federal minimum wage. Make execs lobby to raise the minimum wage so they can increase their bonus or something.

Using the lowest paid employee ratio results in companies outsourcing the low pay jobs so that this ratio looks better. For example janitorial jobs.

Don't give up so easy. Let there be a contract defining a minimum wage that companies can sign up for. Then forbid tier 3 companies from outsourcing anything to tier 1 or doing work for tier 5.

Alternatively the law can be written so that the multiplier is against the greater of (1) the lowest paid domestic employee, or (2) the prevailing wage of the lowest paid foreign employee if they were domestically employed. Something like that, anyways.

They can use multiple levels of indirection to skirt these laws. Form a separate legal entity or contract a company that contacts another company that employs the low income workers. Just too many ways to skirt the problem. Just simply mandate livable wages.

Fatalism is the best way.

It's overly simplistic but I'd try to change things such that:

- if the company is asking for aid or corporate welfare, bonuses for any exec are off the the table. They have to lead by example and take hit, as leaders, before anyone else.

- welfare isn't given to the business directly without strict conditions, and in other ways it is given directly to everyone through payroll.

- the government has the backbone to actually enforce this instead of cowering at the mere sight of money.

It should be harder, almost impossible, for a corporation to receive welfare from the government than an individual person.

Take it further, if the execs are directly responsible for the mess they should also pay for it (for starters by handing over their stocks to government) Skin in the game would allow for even larger bonuses.

Or maybe don't pay any federal aid at all. It rewards bad business, hurts competition and obviously doesn't even work. Instead:

- Give aid directly to the employees who need it instead of relying on the trickle down myth - Buy shares to inject capital into companies as a form of financial aid but get something in return for the people who have to pay for it - Never let companies get big enough that a bailout is necessary in the first place - Let businesses fail and get bought by more competent competitors like the market economy doctrine dictates - Prohibit foreign takeovers

Yes, work it out in bankruptcy. The planes and hotel rooms will still be there and be utilized by stronger folks.

And bailing out cruise lines at taxpayer expense was ridiculous.

Don’t forget Nissan’s Ghosn!

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/19/business/carlos-ghosn-nissan-...

That guy is brilliant and probably the best thing to have ever happened to Nissan and Renault.

The airline execs, on the other hand, ran a glorified bus service in a year where business was so bad that the government had to give them more money than the IMF loans out to entire countries.

AC are particularly disgusting, because their execs spent the last year posting sob stories about how the Canadian government was forcing them to lay off their brave staff (going so far as to convince the people they were firing to post on linkedin that it was all the government’s fault)

Was listening to CBC and they made an excellent point. Which is that the Air Canada board of directors has nobody on it from any union or "representing" the employees. When you look at the compensation committee you see other people in executive roles.

Could you see any union representative on the board of directors voting for executive bonuses after they layoffs over the last year. Until such biases at the BOD level are addresses you will only continue to see similar actions.

It must be so nice being a corporation and saying "oops, our bad, we'll get right on it" instead of going straight to prison if I were to personally defraud a state of so much money.

There’s no fraud involved. Booking was legally allowed to keep the money.

This is just PR damage control. Apparently someone calculated the loss would be more than the 65M so instead of reducing the exec payout they just pay back the money.

If they didn’t need the money in the first place why was it given to them?

Perhaps at the time they asked for the money, it wasn't clear whether they were going to need it?

Also, the government could have dictated any vague good-faith terms under the sun like "if you don't need the money, you must return it" and etc.

But the government didn't do that.

They fired people after they got the money so they kept losses lower that way.

This is why they should be given something like a DDTL so they have to display a need for money but have assurance that the lending facility is available

They might have been about to use it as a zero interest loan?

Why do you keep your own tax deductions? Do you think people only kept their stimulus check if they were hard-up for cash?

The tax system isn't about paying what you feel you should owe. The government bailed out an entire industry and tried to pay out (somewhat) evenly over it. Why should some of the companies be obligated to forgo that cash just because they handled the pandemic better than their competitors?

I didn't ask why they took it. I asked why it was given to them.

I think this is partly explained by "we need to move quickly to help", versus taking time to design and implement some sort of means testing.

I will note that PPP loans in the US are loans, and are only forgiven if you can link the funds to employees' salaries. The percentage of the loan that can be used for owners' salaries is also capped.

It was given to them to keep on their employees for the duration of the aid. The aid covered up to 90% of salaries, the percentage dependent on the revenue drop during that period.

Why do they get 400 million a year in other government subsides despite being wildly profitable?

Seems like the CFO and executives are worth every cent they are paid.

That’s an almost sociopathic way of looking at society. Government is the organization that we, the people, have created to accomplish our common goals. If you think that government is just a big fat cow that needs to be fleeced, and that people who are doing just that are worthy of praise, then I consider you with the same esteem as someone who steals from their neighbors.

Both stealing from neighbors and taking advantage of the govt are very common acts and it's naive to think otherwise

I never said it’s uncommon, I just said I completely and utterly detest the people who do this kind of thing.

I think that the problem lies with the the voters and politicians who set up programs with explicit purpose of giving cash to mega corporations that don't need it. It isn't reasonable to put out a sign that says "free cows" and then blame the those who apply for and receive the cow.

The solution is to stop giving handouts to corporations with billions in profit, not rely on them to refuse the free money.

It is government that steals income tax from my neighbors and from me.

Because they fulfilled the criteria required to receive the money.

It was given to them because the travel branch was hard hit due to COVID and the government handed out this money to avoid lay-offs. In no way was it intended for bonus payments, the fact that that wasn't forbidden doesn't mean it was permitted.

In a free society, the default is that anything not forbidden is permitted.

This money came with some very explicit strings attached about what it was intended for, that you weren't allowed to go buy yachts with it was not made explicit but even so it should be f'ing obvious.

https://business.gov.nl/subsidy/corona-crisis-temporary-emer...

Oh wow, it even explicitly says it’s not to be used for bonuses.

That was added after this scandal first unearthed.

It would be negligent on the booking.com executives behalf if they did not take this money when it was available. If there's an issue, it's in the relief program itself.

If they retained their employees and didn't take bonuses as promised, I might agree. But they didn't. They made empty promises, took the money, sacked their employees, and divvied the loot. This isn't even good for shareholders. It's pure narcissistic greed

Since the proper behavior here (sociopathically maximize private profit from socialized care) is so easy to know, the execs should be outsourced or automated.

Why waste those bonuses on them?

ha-ha!

Also, let them write good documentation up to spec so that the next guy can pick up where they left. Surely some long ago shelved away business logic framework gathering dust some place would be a good place to start.

My joke was that we should write an application called a Manager so that (like with calculators and computers) we can tell future generations the story how a Manager use to be a person.

And while we are at it we might as well build a robot to represent the company. A hundred million customers could talk with the boss simultaneously and it could take proper action instantly.

Plenty of companies did not take government money even though it was available out of solidarity with those companies that did need that money. Booking.com taking that money when they could but didn't need it led to (1) less money available for other companies and (2) a higher deficit.

There is no fraud here at all. No rules were broken.

I am tired of governments deciding to not pursue justice because it would be more expensive, because of the negative impact on the investment climate and the litigation costs. Justice isn't meant to be profitable. Let's bite the fucking bullet and jail the people responsible for this kind of behavior

https://outline.com/Nf5eNe

Here's a little bit of background from an article at the start of the pandemic. The company had originally announced that they would cancel bonuses in exchange for government support. They even promised to protect jobs, which they didn't, and laid off around 5000 anyway.

Just despicable.

Would like to see more info about what exactly they said about bonuses and to whom. The article only mentions it in passing

A quick Google search reveals Booking's net income is two orders of magnitude above those figures. The Dutch State should ask themselves if Booking ever needed those €65M and review the process that got them that money.

They get close to €400 million a year in 'innovation subsidies', so this probably didn't warrant any checks.

https://www.quotenet.nl/financien/belasting/a27160874/nederl...

And they had 6 billion in cash on hand going into the pandemic

That much money for “innovation” and their website still looks like a malware site.

The "innovation subsidies" are well know in the Netherlands as another tax stealing mechanism. Nobody takes them serious. The same as the intellectual patent laws in NL and Luxembourg. For Booking.com apparently most of their back-end is still Perl....

I don’t know about the Netherlands, but I’m France for example “innovation subsidies” are basically just a way to give tax breaks to industry. Every company with 100+ employees will have someone working on claiming as many projects as possible as “innovation” and claiming the relevant tax breaks

Very silly, but it does slightly reduce the prohibitive cost of labour

I'm from an EU country which is quite low on the pecking order. If we offered “innovation subsidies” to our businesses it would be considered state aid and we'd be in infringement.

We have those too in the Netherlands. Even small startup companies can apply and receive these tax breaks when they do technical innovation ('WBSO').

There are also tax-discounts for large and profitable companies ('innovatiebox') that innovate (companies like ASML, NXP) that Booking.com would probably benefit from too.

If Booking.com is innovative then we need a new definition for "innovative".

There's a lot of corporate fraud like this, even in countries that have a reputation of being well governed.

I personally saw a respectable Finnish company leeching on government innovation funds, asking employees to log their working hours under a specific project. The kicker - nobody in Finland was working on that project, in reality it was developed in another country.

This process was revised after the first round of aid to no longer allow the companies to give bonuses.

Are those figures for 2020 / 2021, aka the COVID era?

I don't have those figures either, but at the time I think everybody agreed nobody knew what would happen. Booking.com's revenue might have fallen to close to nil.

Given the choice of paying back the 28 million in bonuses or the paying back the 65 million in state aid, the execs took the hard choice and decided to keep the bonuses.

Hard choice indeed

This feels like something stockholders should sue over, as it's a deliberate choice for executives to screw the company to pad their personal profits.

Of course, and it will show great executives what a swell place to work booking.com really is. Even if the comp is a bit low by executive standards, at least they have your back.

A derivative suit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_suit

The successful result of such a lawsuit: average stockholders will get a $12 credit towards their next booking.com excursion. Class action lawyers take their $18M commission. And the execs keep their jobs and those bonuses.

That’s why boards hire “executive compensation consultants” to bless what they want to do anyway.

Why do you think there was a choice? I don't see anything supporting that in the article.

The governments position was stated as follows: it was more important to maintain a consistent government than to apply the bonus rule retroactively and without warning.

Seems like the company payback was entirely voluntary and this is an example no good deed going unpunished.

Perhaps time for a new law concept: "jury by referendum".

Not only that, but TIL : HN automatically converts 'million' to 'M' and pulls the amount together, even if the title submitted is too long.

automation is overrated. I wouldn't be surprised if it was manually done by one of the backend admins or editors

I just confirmed it's automated by testing it https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=omni

Well, it happened instantly.

I love simple-looking software that has nifty features hidden away behind the scenes where you’d never expect it.

I pointed a non-tech recruiter of ours to HN the other day and she said “that’s a weird looking site”. Yes, yes it is and I like it.

nothing weird about HN

it's perfect

I've always found the indentation being done by a gif kind of weird. But hey, it works.

it's because it was created like this 15 years ago, and if it ain't broke, don't fix it

I wish every website followed this rule

I was wondering what made HN special, aside from its user community. The simplicity and self-governance model are atop that list.

In other words, what if HN was a subreddit? There is actually a parallel one already set up: https://www.reddit.com/r/hackernews/

it's funny - in the banking world, at least with bonds, 'M' is 1000 and 'MM' is 1 million

then you have fox news who uses "G" for 1000, as in 1 grand.

That is sad. We have standards like SI units to help us communicate. Something as wide and non-specialized as Fox News should be using common standards.

Fox News literally had a segment where Tucker Carlson and a guest ranted about how the metric system is a tyrannical globalist plot. I don't think they're interested in such standards.

Is there a better way to signal that you've never worked with your hands?

The way M is used so inconsistently always means I have to stop and ponder the context when I read it.

I do not think the convention of using multiple Ms makes sense anymore in a world of billions and trillions. No reason to use MMM or MMMM instead of k, M, B, T, and eventually Q.

The usage of G is just regrettable, although I guess there is a population that does not associate k with thousand. But that’s more of an indictment in lack of adequate education that they would not have experience with sufficient science courses.

Not sure of the history of the Ms, but it could come from French: 1000 = mille 10e6 = million 10e9 = millard

Mille is originally latin though. Thats probably where the econ people use it from. (Though milliard is French)

Why is G regrettable? Would you prefer they use K? Or would M be better?

I personally find G for grand to make a lot of sense when talking about money. K doesn't make sense because no one says kilodollars. And M is too easily confused for million.

How about 't.' for thousand?

That would be confusing with T for trillion.

k is short for kilo, the SI prefix for 1,000. It makes sense that anything with prefix k or kilo is 1,000 of that, and it’s known globally. Grand is American English slang.

Also, the dollar sign prefix tells you you’re talking about money. And M is for million.

Fox is an American company is it not? It makes sense to use American slang if you're target market is America.

B is ambiguous. G isn't.

Billion is the only commonly used quantity that starts with B. Grand is slang, that may not be known to non Native American English speakers.

There are two values for billion.

Not G, it should be k, of course. For a multiple of 1024.

I think you'd have a bad time in equities if you were to use M for a thousand. K is a bit less ambiguous.

> Social Affairs Minister Wouter Koolmees told Parliament there was little the government could legally do to force Booking.com to return the money because the bonus provision was not immediately included in the rules. He said it was more important to maintain a consistent government than to apply the bonus rule retroactively and without warning.

This sounds either lazy or corrupt. There’s no need to retroactively apply the rule, but there are consequences that could be applied in the future, like forbidding companies that used the money for bonuses to apply for other government grants. Doing nothing because it’s “more important to maintain a consistent government” is messed up.

As a Dutch citizen, I like my government to be consistent and not retroactively petty because of their own failings.

Agreed, as far as I can see, it was a calculated risk that companies would abuse it. Better to just suck it up and hope for public outrage in some of the more despicable cases, which is just what happened here.

> Agreed, as far as I can see, it was a calculated risk that companies would abuse it

During the announcement of the first support package it was explicitly stated that due to the short time frame they had to operate in, they were taking this risk for the greater good. I believe that in the next support package they immediately made it a lot better w.r.t to abusing support.

Personally I really liked how upfront they were with it.

Yeah it's actually the part of the pandemic the government handled the best as far as I can see, they got it up and running really quickly

On the other hand, the government in general and the tax authorities in particular have a history of backtracking and retroactively diminishing promised rulings. Refer to the 30% ruling changes that were retroactively applied after employees had moved to the country and had received a signed declaration from the authority.

Wish this kind of stuff would happen with U.S. bailouts when they spend it all on bonuses.

I don't know much about economics but I do wonder why governments don't finance companies during crises by buying shares, and subsequently recoup our taxes buy selling them in times of prosperity. The UK government did this for the banks in 2008 but have recently been selling shares below market price. Is it corruption or is something you else at play?

Because companies would rather lay people off than sell shares.

Rationally, I think that governments should be ok with that as they will pay either way through unemployment or these rescue packages (at least with some industries where no critical supply chains are ripped out), but there would be enormous political pressure to stem job losses.

"Rationally, I think that governments should be ok with that as they will pay either way through unemployment or these rescue packages"

You are wrong here. The 3rd option is to take money from the investors. The example given in this thread, Lufthansa, the stock holders should have been wiped out. It is called risk.

FWIW, Germany bought 25% of Lufthansa for 9 billion EUR in summer 2020[0] amid the Covid-19 losses, while the market capitalization was less than 4 billion. So they paid more than double the market capitalization to get a quarter of the company.

[0] https://www.spiegel.de/wirtschaft/unternehmen/coronakrise-re...

This reminds me of the Wall Street execs paying themselves huge bonuses after the 2007/2008 bailouts. (And nobody went to jail) The mentality was “The government should have struck a tougher deal!”

Similar discussions in Lithuania: lots of companies that claimed state aid due to Covid went on to purchase supercars, boats, etc.

One caveat that I haven't seen mentioned yet is that the bonuses were awarded in shares, ie they did not affect Booking's liquidity. Not relevant for every (valid) opinion you might have, but relevant when judging e.g. Booking's consideration between not awarding the bonuses and paying back the aid.

That is not a thing. There is no free lunch; the company could have sold those shares and raised money that way for the same dilution.

Hmm, that's fair enough.

I guess that I won’t be using Booking.com in the future.

With interests please, and penalties for not abiding by contract.

They'll also pay back the subsidies in all other countries

This is so extraordinarily corrupted. Dutch employees of Booking, your income tax on the income above 68k EUR is 51% but don't worry the wealth will trickle down. Just work hard, wake up early, and be nice to people. Not.

OT. Where do you book hotels?

What does US execs mean here? I see nothing in the article about the US

from a previous article I read on this, the executives were based in the US. I don't have a link

"Some 5.8 million euros in shares and cash went to CEO Glenn Fogel, and 2.8 million euros went to Peter Millones, the vice president. Nearly 20 million euros, mostly in shares, went to CFO David Goulden, according to company documents reviewed by NRC"

All 3 are Americans.

https://nltimes.nl/2021/05/28/bookingcom-gives-eu28m-bonuses...

So this was not cash compensation? Should I put the pitchfork down now?

They laid off a lot of regular workers during COVID. The funds were intended to help workers. Even netting out the bonuses, it's not a good look.

US execs, as in, the people who imported US tech management and fskced the whole thing up.

I wonder if Mozilla received state aid.

"Company X got state aid and paid Y in bonuses" seems to be one of those cookie cutter news reports that pop up several times per day the past year. The titles seem to imply that state aid directly went to a few senior executives. Outrage, right?

But why not look past the knee jerk reaction?

1) In most cases I'm aware of, after digging deeper, you find out that the state aid is not for the company - it's for the employees. Running a business is no charity and if you have employees that are superfluous due to current market situation you lay them off unless the cost of retraining future employees is higher than paying operating expenses to have employees around that are not working as much as they used to. State aid can affect the decision by offloading expenses to the state, for employment safety.

2) Bonus payouts may be for last year performance and not related to either covid or the state aid at all. Just because you have two large numbers within the same order of magnitude doesn't mean they are related. Bonuses may have been paid of regardless of state aid.

I can't speak for this situation in Europe, but with the US PPP loans, companies basically had 2 months of their payroll paid for. This also means that got 2 months of free labor.

With the no payroll costs, where does that "extra" payroll money that would/should of gone to payroll go? Investors? Executives?

Well, a great deal of the money was to forestall layoffs; discount-rate labor doesn't do you much good if you don't need it.

Money is fungible. Aid that goes to paying non exec employees frees up money to be used for bonuses, so aid went to bonuses.

I think people are more mad at the idea that companies that didn’t need aid got aid.

On top of that, it looks like the bonuses were not cash but mostly company shares. I don't see what's the problem with that...

The optics are the problem. Lay off thousands of people, and get paid huge bonuses?

It is, for people who don't really understand how company, executives, and employees incentives align.

Why does the asset class matter?

It matters what they got paid in. If they got paid in anything other than shares, I would agree. But the point of shares is that it aligns the economic incentives for the executives and the company. Shares are directly dependent on the economic success of the company. And the ability to employ people and pay them salaries is also directly dependent on the economic success of the company.

If they sell shares and pay employees, then they're not helping the long-term sustainability of the company and its ability to continue hiring people and paying them.

Shares can easily be exchanged for money.

Paying execs huge bonuses (whether in cash, gold, shares or whatever), while taking huge sums in state aid and laying off thousands of employees is morally despicable behaviour at best.

It does matter what they got paid in. If they got paid in anything other than shares, I would agree. But the point of shares is that it aligns the economic incentives for the executives and the company. Shares are directly dependent on the economic success of the company. And the ability to employ people and pay them salaries is also directly dependent on the economic success of the company.

If they sell shares and pay employees, then they're not helping the long-term sustainability of the company and its ability to continue hiring people and paying them.

So without state aid they would pay out bonuses but not regular pay to employees?

They didn't need it but made use of it anyway. This is not a matter of rules, but of ethics

I think what's really crazy here is that Booking.com would rather lose €65M than not pay executives €28M in bonuses (for a total loss to corporate coffers of... €93M?).

Sure, state aid is "for the employees", but in most of these cases: The company obviously could've paid them anyways, since they had this much spare compensation for their rich executives, and that the company continued to benefit from the labor of employees that the government was paying the salaries for.

The government, and by proxy, the taxpayers, end up doubly screwed over, while the corporation gets to continue to enrich itself, and enrich its executives, who are already wealthy.

Rather than give corporations huge blank checks, governments should've sent that money directly to individuals, and allowed corporations to fail or not as per usual. Most of these companies would still exist anyways, since they have plenty of money.

You're correct that the state aid was intended for employees, yet it was given to booking.com and not on the people's personal bank accounts. They were more or less free to do with that as they saw fit; the only condition was that they couldn't fire people for 3 months (did did fire ~25% of the work force after those 3 months).

In this case, they changed their own rules regarding bonuses on account of being an exceptional situation and that, apparently, these bonuses were desperately needed. How many of those 25% of people could they have retained if they didn't pay millions in "desperately needed" bonuses (not all were in shares btw)?

The original reporting[1] was fairly detailed with specifics, subsequent reporting left out some that; you know how these things go... There is some nuance here, but it's still leaving a really bad taste in my mouth.

But to be fair, I find it hard to blame just booking.com for this because it's the entire culture that's just rotten IMHO. It's all "free market" this and "no government interference" that but then also "plz government help us" when things go belly-up. When people point out the hypocrisy it's "for the employees, not the company!" True, but misses the larger picture IMO. "Running a business is no charity", well apparently it is because the tax payer will happily get you out of trouble with the "but think of the employees!" emotional blackmail argument only to have them turn around with "free market!!!" a few months later while swimming in their obscene and unnecessary stacks of money.

And to be clear, I'm actually quite in favour of the free market and capitalism (moderated to some degree), but this doesn't strike me as either.

[1]: In Dutch: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/2021/05/27/booking-paste-bonusrege...

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