Thousands of businesses that received Rishi Sunak’s Covid loans have gone bust without paying the money back… leaving taxpayers with a £500million bill

41 comments

  1. Not a huge surprise.

    You start speaking to small businesses, it isn’t long before you realise that probably 80% of them are skirting bankruptcy at any given point in time. Which means that a loan without any sort of collateral or affordability check was always incredibly high risk, even without Covid.

  2. I’ll put money on some of these ‘businesses’ were linked to Rishi and his pal’s. The whole lot circle jerking each other, corruption at its finest.

  4. What’s crazy is this is a fuckload of money, and also Rishi’s wife could pay it singlehandedly if she wished, eight times over.

  6. But if he hadn’t of done anything that could be accessed quickly for businesses over the Covid lockdowns there would have been mass uproar that he was letting the small business disappear. Just cannot win.

  7. I actually work for a bank in customer service bounce back loans and people struggling or failing to pay them makes up a huge amount of my day.

    Seems like a lot of people took out huge loans, up to £50,000 and just assumed it would all be fine. Now they have repayments around £1000 a month and no understanding of how the actual loan works or what the terms and conditions they agreed too were.

    It was something of a double edged sword. Businesses needed money ASAP, not enough time for normal checks and people making overly optimistic predictions about how long COVID restrictions would apply.

    Some people were greedy, some were unlucky, some just needed more time for their industry to pick back up. End result is the same, unaffordable loan the taxpayer ends up paying.

  10. Worse still is the massive scale of fraud because the government prevented the banks from carrying out any due diligence.

  11. I don’t care for this racist classist rich tory cunt one bit but covid loans were not a bad idea. Kept my business afloat at least.

    I assume they made the calculations and found out they either risk losing x amount in failed businesses not paying back or losing y amount with more businesses failing and a lot of people losing their jobs.

    Making it easy to claim loans kept new small businesses alive. Though I am sure tory chums also abused it and took a huge bite out of those loans so there’s also that

  12. More worried about the covid Ppe waste than this to be honest, times were hard people needed help.
    Company’s getting 50mill contracts with less assets than my tiny one person business having never worked as ppe suppliers before that rings far more alarm bells to me.

  14. [https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2022/04/how-the-uk-squandered-billions-during-the-covid-19-pandemic](https://www.newstatesman.com/chart-of-the-day/2022/04/how-the-uk-squandered-billions-during-the-covid-19-pandemic) HMRC figures are here. The measures led to the resignation of Lord Agnew here [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzDCmrWOr5Y](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzDCmrWOr5Y)

    In total £154 for every person in the country, went to shitheads fleecing the country that were meant to support the country. It was important that support was provided; it is utterly dismal this is not even black market toilet roll shenanigans to profiteer out of a national collective misery, that’s impact has since impacted and in part tumbled a PM. Maggie’s children?

    I agree with Lord Agnews speech in the youtube video. The damage that it does is great. It was funding that could have been distributed to those facing genuine hardships as a result, costing less than the fraud, but it was withdrawn.

  15. ‘Gone bust’

    Have a friend who knows someone who got several 50k loans and then immediately left the country to go back to Turkey.

  18. It’s alright folks. It won’t be long before they’re all trading again. Just have to find out what their new company names are.

  23. I am dying to see if the levels of fraud around the “Eat out to help out scheme” are ever released. That system was wide open to various levels of fraud from the simple to the harder to detect.

  26. The flip side is with etter checks, many more would have gone bust waiting too long. Ours was saved and we’re still here. I think go after the grifters, but not everyone who took the loan and went bust will have done it on purpose. It was an extremely difficult time and hindsight is 20/20.

  27. Yeah, as someone who worked in business banking at the time and actively dealt with applications, I saw this coming a mile off.

    People were getting huge loans with minimal checks for businesses that blatantly wouldn’t last and didn’t have the turnover to support the amount they were getting.

  29. I know personally of one that was failing that took out said loans, spaffed the money then liquidated the business only to set up the same type of service under a new name. Absolute crook happy to bang on about people on benifits etc.

  30. That seems low. A local cinema in Swansea got £53k in Covid grants and didn’t even bother to buy hand sanitiser. The owner DID open a Cryo-Beauty centre in February 2021… Wonder where she got the money from…

  31. What is this compared to what was literally just given to self-employed workers? Or paid to furloughed staff?

  33. I’m sure there was some fraud.
    But this was expected and normal.
    We intervened to give loans out without asking questions for the sake of speed. With alot of companies operating with weeks of operating costs as savings, intervention needed to be quick, even at the cost of monetary costs.

    If you wanted to avoid £0.5bil in losses, you’d have had to delay by multiple weeks with paperwork, at this specific instance it was very important not wait, or the consequences of business closures would have been much larger. Frankly in the scheme of government expenditure and even coronavirus measures, £0.5billion in uncollected debts isn’t much of a big deal.

  35. My guess is that a lot of these businesses were hand to mouth and took these loans as one last hoorah. Someone I went to uni with took one out for her floristry/photograpy business, but she only did weddings and didn’t diversify. Im fairly sure she used the money to relocate abroad as she now lives in Bali.

  36. The problem is sorting out the money from those businesses who genuinely needed the loans from those who took advantage of the system. I’m not fussed about helping out businesses like restaurants or gyms, they are vital businesses that needed all the help they could get. It is the lack of sure diligence that meant anyone could start a company to claim the money that annoys me and needs investigating properly. I cannot imagine someone like Sunak not knowing people would do that, he is too well-versed in deceptive businesses practices to claim ignorance.

  40. Can we live in the real world. If Sunak did nothing, he would have been criticised. He tried to help these businesses and wasn’t 100% successful, and is criticised. At least he tried to help them.

    For the record I do not and have never voted Tory.

  41. No surprised at all. It was a handout. How many of his Tory mates claimed it for themselves? I know two people who own their own businesses and took the £50k like it was free money. They’ve both since closed their limited companies and started new ones. No personal liability for the company loans. What could you wrong.

Leave a Reply