It seems that most of that €28M was "mostly" paid out in "shares": iow, minimal cash was transferred. That may make it both better or worse for everyone else at Booking.com (if shares go back in value as travel gets reinstated, it will effectively be more than that), but the aid itself was not used to cover these bonuses. Basically, Booking.com shareholders have redistributed their shares to a couple of employees.
If, otoh, Booking.com goes bust, the value of these bonuses would plummet. If they attempted to cash in, it's likely value would go down too.
Not going into the moral background of this, but the title and comments here were misleading to me.
Buybacks are not mentioned in this article, and you quote a number from 2019, which is, to the best of my knowledge, pre-pandemic.
If you are saying that they foresaw the pandemic and government grants, well...
Now, I wouldn't be surprised that they were doing that even in 2020, considering they were also taking out $3B in loans (in addition to $100M of subsidies) to maintain the share value or reinvesting in themselves when others had lower trust in them, but when all of these numbers are stacked together, this article title is obviously click-baiting ("Top execs receive €25M of stocks while company borrows €3B and gets €100M in grants" is not something too much fuss will be raised about).
The bigger problem IMO is the regular subsidies they receive for "innovating" (somebody here brought up a figure of >$400M of tax subsidies a year).
I do agree that top executive remuneration is commonly out of hand, but I think that applies even to "regular folk": I find it unfair that my programming salary is like 7x the average salary (10x the median) in my "developing world" country. Both of those problems equally need to be fixed. While I may be providing suitably more economic benefit to my employer, I am not "worth" that much more: the incentives and values are messed up somewhere.
You have entirely missed the point. Which subsidies are bigger is irrelevant to what I said. The financial quarter the stockbuybacks happened under is irrelevant to what I said.
When a company has used so much of their recent cash in stock buybacks, it is disingenuous to call stock bonuses ethically different than cash bonuses.
To say the same thing another way. If the company was willing to issue those stocks to pay bonuses, why didn't they issue those stocks and sell them instead of taking bailout money.
What's to suggest bonuses would not have been paid out in stocks even without the bailout money?
To me it reads as if grants reduced the loans they'd be taking, but they've rewarded their top execs with stock (meaning they need to have a lot of trust in company to they just arranged 3B worth of loans for).
To clarify my point: I just do not see a connection between bailout money and bonuses (mostly paid in stock), which the OP emphasizes. Your point stands regardless of subsidies.
Your economic worth is well defined by supply and demand. It is incoherent to say you are not "worth" the salary you are paid; if that were in fact the case, your salary would be lower, or you would eventually not have your job.
Is this fair? I would argue yes. Economic worth is a transparent situation, and it is rather clear that by positioning a career towards high demand work, anyone can improve their station in life. This is much more fair compared to some alternate systems where winners and losers are arbitrary, and opaquely determined by politics.
It's not as simple: someone doing a mundane job in a rural town in USA south is likely still making more than a University professor here. So one has to optimize for the locality and/or have an opportunity to change it.
I think it is unfair, since you have to control for many things not directly in your hands.
Perhaps it feels worse because I've been hacking at computers since before it was clear it's the job of the future/present, so I did no optimization, but rather just doing what I love.
If you would like companies to just keep billions on hand for totally unpredictable events that shut down the global economy, why don't you start by writing to your congressman asking him to create legislation repealing the Accumulated Earnings Tax, which punishes businesses for holding too much money.
If, otoh, Booking.com goes bust, the value of these bonuses would plummet. If they attempted to cash in, it's likely value would go down too.
Not going into the moral background of this, but the title and comments here were misleading to me.