ING

Jeroen van der Veer, president of ING's board of commissioners, again defended the bank's now scrapped plan to increase the salary of CEO Ralph Hamers from 2 million to 3 million euros per year.

Dutch bank ING managed to track down the fault that resulted in 3 million transactions being processed twice. The bank reversed the double payments and by now all customers should have their money back, RTL Nieuws reports.

ING decided to withdraw a proposed salary increase for CEO Ralph Hamers due to mass criticism from society and politicians. "We realize that we underestimated the public response in the Netherlands to this clearly sensitive issue", chairman of the supervisory board Jeroen van der Veer said in a statement on Tuesday, ANP reports.

GroenLinks wants to block a massive salary increase for ING CEO Mark Hamers with a legislative amendment. Party leader Jesse Klaver hopes to pass this law through parliament and the Senate as quickly as possible, so that it can be submitted to the Council of State for urgent advice this week. ING shareholders will discuss the proposed increase on April 23rd, ANP reports. 

Large Dutch banks invested billions in the meat industry over the past years, and a large part of that money went to companies where animal welfare is not in order, according to a new report by Eerlijke Bankwijzer. These include companies that sell battery farm chickens, keep their sows locked up in cages, or slaughter animals in controversial ways, RTL Nieuws reports.

The Eerlijke Bankwijzer, or Fair Bank Guide, looks at whether Dutch banks invest their money responsibly. Amnesty International, FNV, Mileudefensie and Oxfam Novib, among others, contribute to it.

An 18-year-old Oosterhout man arrested in connection with DDoS attacks on Dutch financial institutions, wanted "to show that a teenager can simply crash all banks with a relatively simple attack", suspect Jelle S. wrote in an email to the Volkskrant shorty before his arrest.

ABN Amro, ING, Rabobank and the Tax Authority again faced DDoS attacks on Tuesday, though this time the financial services managed to deter them better than over the weekend. The attacks caused a short disruption in payment system iDeal, but the problems were quickly restored, NOS reports.

ABN Amro was troubled by attacks all day long, but they were mostly successfully fought off, a spokesperson said to the broadcaster. Around 5:30 p.m. the bank faced a short disruption.

The Dutch Tax Authority was hit by a DDoS attack on Monday, NOS reports. According to the tax service, its site was difficult to reach for a time on Monday morning, but everything should be working again. Three Dutch banks also faced such cyber attacks since Saturday.

Dutch banks ABN Amro and ING were both hit by DDoS attacks over the weekend, leaving customers unable to use their mobile- or online banking for hours at a time, NOS reports.

In a DDoS attack large amounts of data traffic is sent to a particular website, overloading its server and thereby crashing the site. 

This year Hurricane Irma, the parliamentary elections in March and the government formation that followed, a Dutch comedian mocking Donald Trump, and gay bashing in Arnhem held NL Times the most readers' attention. Here follows the top 10 most read stories on NL Times in 2017, in contrast to our picks for the top stories of the year.

YouTube founder Chad Hurley was announced as a new headliner to replace actor Kevin Spacey at ING's BusinessBoost event in Rotterdam. At the event he will discuss his time at YouTube and the investments he made thereafter.

Hurley founded the video sharing service in 2005, together with two former colleagues from PayPal. A year and a half later they sold the platform to Google for $1.65 billions. Since 2013 he is the co-owner of the video editing and sharing website Mixbit.