Contact: Delphine de la Kethulle
Deloitte
+32 2 600 60 53

The amount of subsidy advice from ‘Grants & Incentives’ to businesses is growing structurally within the overall range of professional services offered by Deloitte, the largest business service provider in Belgium and there is also an increase in demand for this type of support at an international level. This is why Deloitte is further internationalising its Grants & Incentives-services both in European terms and to the rest of the world. As Brussels is the EU decision making centre when it comes to subsidies, Deloitte is setting up its Grants & Incentives coordination centre there.

Deloitte’s Grants & Incentives team informs and supports multinationals, government agencies and centres of knowledge in a structured, proactive manner in their search for subsidies, loan and tax breaks. “The offer is so large and complex that businesses and organisations have to constantly invest more time to find the subsidy schemes that are relevant to them.” says Chris Haenen, Senior Manager Grants & Incentives with Deloitte. “So the specialised Grants & Incentives department offers support in all phases of the acquisition: from the detecting of subsidy opportunities via the drafting and lodging of applications through to communication with the body granting the subsidy and the project administration.”

International expertise
Nowadays Deloitte is the largest provider of advice on subsidies in the Belgian market. As over the last few years the request for support across national borders has increased considerably, Deloitte is setting up an international coordination centre in Brussels, the heart of the European Union with the Grants & Incentives specialists operating from the head office in Diegem.

In more concrete terms:

• the centre sticks closely to the subsidy policy of the European Commission, for example the structure funds and the R&D-programmes;
• it supports the subsidy applications from request to approval;
• it organises conferences for its own country organisations and customers;
• the specialists ensure that the service provided within the EU guarantees the same consistent high quality everywhere;
• the centre organises an annual Grants & Incentives Academy where the consultants are given an update on the most recent developments and trends and get a chance to sharpen their expertise.

To conclude, the coordination point in Brussels supports the Grants & Incentives services in the United States. In this way, American customers that are active in the EU or wish to invest there are efficiently assisted. Likewise the Brussels centre signposts European companies active in America to the right contacts in the USA.

The European Grants & Incentives network today boasts over 100 highly qualified consultants with a wide variety of backgrounds (economists, jurists, engineers). With the diverse range of knowledge and the ongoing exchange of ‘best practices’ the centre can offer the most accurate and apt expertise to suit each task. The Grants & Incentives international network stretches as far as all the European member states and further beyond. Evidence of this is the intensive cooperation with countries in North-America, the Middle-East and the Far East.