I’ve been banging on about Covid fraud for months, both over the Bounce Back Loan Scheme to help businesses and the Kickstart youth jobs scheme.
Both were, in theory, admirable schemes to help the economy survive the pandemic, but in practice were so badly run that they proved to be a scammer’s dream.
So I can see why the Conservative peer Lord Agnew of Oulton resigned this week from his post as minister responsible for counter-fraud.
He accused the Treasury of having “no knowledge or little interest in the consequences of fraud” and described oversight of the loan scheme by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, as “woeful”.
You won’t find a more shocking example of this than Louis Maxwell, who got £50,000 for his vehicle recovery firm in Newport, South Wales.
The Insolvency Service says: “Maxwell did in fact spend around £22,000 to purchase a new tow truck, but spent the remainder on Class A drugs.
"He then sold the new truck to also fund his drug habit. At the time he was serving convictions for driving offences which meant he was not permitted to drive.
"He subsequently filed for bankruptcy in August 2021, which triggered an investigation by the Insolvency Service.”
Sue Tovey, lead investigator at the Insolvency Service, said: “Taxpayers’ money was made available to help genuine businesses get through the lockdown period and where there have been abuses, we will not hesitate to take action.”
The 35-year-old has been made bankrupt for six years and is awaiting trial on drugs, driving and theft charges.
Then there’s the astonishing case of Asif Hussain, who has just been jailed for 15 years for leading a gang that exported stolen cars to the Middle East.
Manchester Crown Court heard that his company German Automotive 365 Ltd also got a £50,000 Bounce Back Loan even though it was not registered for VAT and Hussain has 48 previous convictions.
Judge Anthony Cross QC told the 44-year-old from Bolton: “That a criminal such as you could obtain such a huge sum is staggering.”
Hussain’s accomplice Ibraaz Shafique, who was jailed for five years for the car crimes, managed to get two Bounce Back Loans.
One was for £50,000 for his company Merc Car Breakers Ltd and the other was £45,000 for himself as a sole trader, which was paid into a bank account opened just five days earlier.
The judge said that the “most basic of checks” would have revealed that the loan applications were fraudulent.
These are far from isolated examples of milking the scheme, which offered businesses cash of up to 25% of turnover, up to £50,000.
Tuition company Scholars Academy Ltd of Brighouse, West Yorks, claimed a turnover of £200,000 to get £50,000.
In fact its monthly income was never more than £640, according to an Insolvency Service report.
One of the directors, 39-year-old Aamer Aslam, has now been banned from running companies for 11 years. Co-director Razwan Ashraf, 31, also ran a second education business, Progress First Limited.
The Insolvency Service says that this too fraudulently inflated its turnover to get a £50,000 loan.
Ashraf has been banned from being a director for 10 years.
Others directors who milked the scheme include 55-year-old Iain Flitcroft of Haywards Heath, West Sussex, who got an 11-year directorship ban for overstating the turnover of his property company Hangar 8 Pashley Limited.
Colin Williams of CW Beverages Limited of Bromsgrove, Worcs, also got an 11-year ban.
He received a loan of £40,000 even though a simple check would have revealed that his company has never traded and its bank balance was £0.
Sukhdeep Singh of SKS Holdings Limited in Billericay, Essex, got a nine year ban, and Amman and Umaad Sultan and Asim Malik of Blue Line Cars (Ilford) Limited in East London all got seven year bans, as did Gabriel-Ioan Racolta of Colchester building company Gam Racolta Limited.
And these are just some of this year’s cases – I exposed many others in 2021.
Coincidentally, this week I received a response from the Department for Business to my Freedom of Information request concerning Covid fraud statistics.
It said that fraud protection controls had blocked the awarding of 62,380 loans coming to £2.2billion.
But it refused to give figures for the fraudulent loans that have been awarded.
Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee estimates that up to 60% of loans from the scheme, amounting to £27billion, might never be repaid.
Yesterday the Chancellor Rishi Sunak insisted on Twitter that the government would "do everything we can" to recover stolen money, writing: "I'm not ignoring it, and I'm definitely not 'writing it off',"
Investigate@mirror.co.uk
