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Comment by gargs | Hacker News Reader

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...

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.

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....

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

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