In what might be some sort of shameful record, director Stephen Burke conned his way to no fewer than four Bounce Back Loans.
The Government scheme was designed to help businesses through the coronavirus lockdown by offering loans up to 25% of a company’s turnover, with a maximum of £50,000.
Burke was a director of four companies that used fake figures showing incomes ranging from £200,000 and £320,000, when the true highest turnover for any of them was a mere £3,400.
Between May and November 2020 he was able to get four loans of £50,000, and he then tried to dissolve the companies without repaying the money.
Bounce Back Loans were supposed to be used for genuine business costs, but Burke used £174,000 of the £200,000 he got to repay money borrowed from his former partner.
Now the 64-year-old from Rotherham has been banned from being a company director for 11 years for what Rob Clarke, Chief Investigator at the Insolvency Service, called his “abhorrent conduct”.
" Coronavirus support schemes were introduced to help British businesses through the most testing of times, providing them with the financial support to protect jobs and return to prosperity," Mr Clarke said.
“Stephen Burke not only sought to defraud the Bounce Back Loan scheme for personal gain, but then sought to cover his tracks by dissolving the companies he’d used."
Bounce Bank Loan money did not come directly from the Government but through banks. In Burke’s case, two lots of £50,000 were handed out by the TSB, one for Woodhouse Civil Engineering Limited, whose real turnover was just £654, and one for Yorkshire Site Preparation Limited which was dormant with no turnover at all.
So why didn’t the TSB check these figures, which are publicly available at Companies House? Was it because the loans were 100% underwritten by the Government, so it had no incentive to prevent fraud?
A spokesperson for the TSB said: “The terms of the emergency support were set out by government, and TSB fully complied with its duties under the scheme.”
Burke's third company Yorkshire Plant Hire & Sales got a £50,000 Bounce Bank Loan through HSBC despite a turnover of just £3,400. The fourth company was Richmond Brokers, which got £50,000 via Yorkshire Bank despite a negligible turnover of £635.
In a separate case, Yilmaz Fehmi, 53, used fake figures to scam three different lockdown help schemes.
He got a Bounce Bank Loan of £50,000 by overstating the income of his restaurant Nemonthron in Saffron Waldron, Essex, transferring most of the money to his private bank account.
He also got Local Council Support Grants to which he was not entitled, including almost £27,000 after the restaurant had ceased trading.
And he got a Job Retention Support Grant of more than £13,000 which was supposed to help pay employees but he transferred all the money to himself.
In total he pocketed more than £117,000 and has now been banned from being a director for 12 years.
investigate@mirror.co.uk
