Losses to “Fraud and Error” From Taxpayer-Backed Covid Loan Scheme Estimated at £15 Billion. Where Did it All Go?
Criminals have been caught with suitcases stuffed with cash provided by HM Treasury under the Government’s Covid loan scheme that has been repeatedly abused by fraudsters – with £50,000 gambled by one claimant, and another using part of £35,000 on garden improvements. MailOnline has more.
Border guards caught several people “carrying large amounts of money” believed to be from the Government’s Bounce Back loan scheme which was then seized under the Proceeds of Crime Act, the Home Office said.
Other cases of abuse include a pub landlord who pocketed £29,000 in fake “consultancy fees”, a soft drinks company owner who inflated his turnover by 100 times to get the maximum loan, and a restaurant boss who was given a loan despite having been evicted from his premises for failing to pay rent.
As much as £17 billion out of the £47 billion officials paid out in Bounce Back loans will never be paid back, according to recent estimates, and of that about £4.9 billion is thought to have been lost to fraud.
Overall, “fraud and error” across all the Government’s Covid programmes, including the furlough scheme, is expected to have cost the taxpayer £15.7 billion. However, a fraud expert warned the figure is “just the tip of the iceberg” as more cases emerge. Those we know of already include:
• Steven Davison, 32, received a £35,000 loan but spent it on gambling debts and a garden renovation
• Ciaran Twomey, landlord, was granted £50,000 even though his pub company was no longer operating
• Adrian Cusiac, a builder from north London, spent £50,000 loan on poker and said “I’m not proud of myself”
• Unnamed wholesaler from Southsea claimed more than £20,000 through a shell firm he bought off the shelf
• Unnamed ex-fruit and veg trader claimed £28,000 and used it to pay himself £10,000 and buy a £2,400 watch.
Worth reading in full.
Stop Press: The scale of similar fraud in the United States is even greater. The Federal Government cannot say for sure how much of the more than $900 billion in pandemic-related unemployment relief has been stolen, but credible estimates range from $87 billion to $400 billion – at least half of which went to foreign criminals. NBC News has more.
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The whole thing was just a heist really, wasn’t it?
A last ditch attempt to cream as much wealth off the public as possible, while ‘money’ in its current form had any value. And the public for their part bashed pots and pans together to celebrate their own immiseration.
Absolutely. But the public think being legally ripped off is the basis for a modern prosperous society.
The state basically takes money from one group of people in society and gives it to another. And they have the monopoly on violence to enforce it on those who aren’t so keen to participate in the scam.
Indeed they do. I’m surprised they don’t start bashing pots and pans together when they get their 2022 energy bills.
Time to start bashing heads together.
Now there’s an idea. Do it fast enough and you could generate some real heat!
And £25 million I heard to pay the wages of the Ukrainian army as well as the £milions in military equipment and no doubt more cash in due course.
Not to mention the ambulances and medication. Bleed the UK dry to feed the coffers of the Globalists. The same game plan over and over again and still people sit back and do nothing.
Our culture has changed since we have allowed people from corrupt cultures to enter Government and local office. We were a proud nation who stood by honour and fairness. That went long ago.
The public all over the place. There was rampant fraud in Australia, too – all to save the economy, you understand.
But when Australian public universities applied for help (having been devastated by the loss of their international students), the laws were changed three times to ensure that they could get no assistance at all (despite being classed, as providers of education, in the nation’s four largest export industries).
The money is only there to be looted by a select few.
Strangely, I have not see one Australian police person named in all this time, you know, one who was dishing out fines and violence against ‘protesters’ and ‘lockdown rule breakers’.
Where are their names? Did no-one take their badge numbers?
Where are the names of the Canadian police persons who have made, and still are, the lives of ‘protesters’ and ‘the unjabbed’ a misery?
Pretty much. And you can’t really blame ‘ordinary people’ looking at their politicians ‘at it’ and thinking “I’ll have some of that too.”
When I was at the two Collinson’s ‘Covid Test Stations’ at Heathrow you could see the staff smirking… one of them laughed in my face and said “Yeah – give us your money or you can’t fly!” £99 for a PCR test, £50 for an ‘antigen’ test. I very much doubt they sent the PCR cotton buds anywhere, just picked ‘negative’ or ‘positive’ out of a hat… you only need to look up reviews of these companies offering PCR testing to see they are all run by con merchants. ‘Government approved’ con merchants.
I always thought governments and cockle servants were useless but the scale of the incompetence is just too large to take in. Perhaps public sector employees doling out taxpayers money need to have some skin in the game. Maybe their car and house could be put against any loans as collateral to ensure they have done their due diligence?
with £50,000 gambled by one claimant, and another using part of £35,000 on garden improvements
about right considering,
give handfuls of free money with no checks and get the consequences
Financially I gained nothing from COVID. No support as a low earning freelancer.
However I gained in awareness.
I recognise that most of the western human race are a weak species
I would never vote labour again
I now support Brexit having been a remoaner
I see the connection between WEF and reset
I don’t watch BBC
And found daily sceptics
And more
I voted for Brexit because Tony Blair told me not to. This was probably the most politically astute, veridical and empirical reasoning anyone in the country gave to their vote.
A steep learning curve – and it’s chilly at the top.
But the view is great, if bleak at times.
I am similar, a self employed contractor. No work for 14 months and no assistance.
I too built a greater awareness. I did vote Brexit and was already aware of WEF and their fellow travellers with a globalist view. I ditched my TV in 2001 so the BBC was not part of my world, which helped.
Welcome to the club. Awareness, however painful, is always better than ignorance. Most sleepwalk through life, so that is a lesson worth learning.
The main lesson is that no one is coming to your rescue. Work, income, surviving their attempts at resetting and all the rest. You are on your own. That is worth knowing and it puts you ahead of the curve.
Awareness though is painful, is it not ? And often accompanied by a feeling of helplessness when one looks around and notices the majority being so bl**dy utterly compliant, in their comfortable, pathetic little lives….
The Tories mates have been making out like bandits thanks to the covid con. Of course individual Tories and the Tory party will get their cut in due course.
See Owen Paterson for details.
A friend of mine owns a small company employing about 35 people. He said he was asked if he wanted £60k because of Covid, he said of course why not have £60k for free. He’s on the level and honest, so can you imagine how many dodge characters would of taken advantage?
I didn’t make a penny from it, it sounds like you didn’t either. What mugs we are!
What is so maddening about this is that a friend of mine was absolutely hounded daily by the inland revenue for £5k in taxes he didn’t realise that he owed them until he got the demand and his accountant had called to say that they had made a mistake in his tax arrangements. His business was strugging before he got the tax demand but still they hounded him until what with all the stress of running his business he had no option but to fold the company and go bust all for lousy £5k. Now I’m not saying this person is entirely blameless and perhaps he should have been more involved with his taxation arrangements instead of leaving it in the hands of a bunch of cowboys who obviously didn’t know what they were doing – but what makes me angry is that the inland revenue will hound the small people for unpaid taxes – in some cases a mere few hundred pounds – and when they finally manage to squeeze every penny out of them the government then gets this money and then basically pisses it all up the wall … how many small businesses went bust just so… Read more »
I’m still being hounded for tax they claim that I owe them (based somewhat ironically on their computer models rather than reality) as “coronavirus has damaged the economy so we need to collect tax debts to help it recover”
Silly me thinking it was the government’s hysterical response that had f***ed the economy.
See Ken Frost’s regular blog on this
https://hmrcisshite.blogspot.com/2022/04/hmrc-is-insane-litany-of-failure.html
The bastards now aim at those who lack high-powered lawyers and accountants to defend themselves.
My advice to everyone is to learn at least the basics of taxation and don’t rely on someone else to keep it right.
There’s a reason they don’t teach us about it in school…
The Civil Service has told Boris to pretend that it was all part of a ‘Universal Basic Income’ scheme…
It is a salient lesson in exactly what would happen under a no-questions-asked free-for-all.
It’s time those in Government are required to put up collateral as surety for taxpayers money mis-spent, wasted, or lost.
In local government, officers advise, members (i.e. councillors) decide. Members can be personally liable for losses which members of the public occur if the members go against the offcers’ professional advice.
In central government, maybe we should consider making central government ministers (Jim Hacker) liable for some of the losses they incur when they go against professional advice (Sir Humphrey).
It’s not easy of course. But in recent years I think overriding civil servants’ advice has become more common. The minister has zero liability even if his decision wastes £35 bn of taxpayer’s money (in simple terms, that equates to £500 for every man, woman and child.)
The covid fraud figure for the UK is at least £410bn
The £15bn figure is propaganda from the dictatorship
Yep. All the money spent on testing was and is just a fraudulent racket.
Followed by most of what was spent on gene therapies.
Still is! It is not over!
The whole thing has been a fraud.
What do you expect with a “scamdemic”?
And idiots like me pay back my loan, a freelancer who had the economy slammed shut in my face and offered zero help whilst PAYE gardeners were given free cash and allowed to carry on working, not to mention the ten million on Furlogh at 80% pay
Oh and I got the NI rise as well to help cover everybody else who doesn’t have to pay a bean back.
My gaffer had some of that free cash. We worked all the way through the scamdemic. He didn’t need the money but it was there, so he took it.
Where is the distinction between the criminals here?
Does anyone think the jab contracts were more wholesome?
I think you have to go to a meta level. It isn’t the politicians or the masses that are corrupt but more fundamentally that money itself has been corrupted. This is small change when you look at how black box transactions ebable the biggest players to game the system on a microsecond basis. The fact that we have carpetbaggers running the show is a symptom not a cause. Their attitude is that if you don’t have the perspicacity to see the system in its corrupt entirety then you deserve everything you get.
If you put food on the table in front of gluttons, who is to blame for it being eaten up?
Yum, yum, in my tum!
You put a photo of a sportscar as if this is the acme of inquisitiveness. We are talking about junkies. Or sharks in the midst of a feeding frenzy. And with or without the coof it has been clear to us for a very long time that we are ruled by the spiv class. So why should there be any surprise now?
Oh well.
What’s £15 billion when you’ve spaffed £400 billion on a glorified flu virus?
Not to worry though, it was only our money, not theirs.
Into the pockets of ‘friends of the Government’?
And let’s not forget those cronies of MPs who were given huge sums to supply PPE but bought £m houses with their obscene ‘profit’. The fraud yet again goes from the top to the bottom. Large bureaucratic government is adangerous animal with little common sense but much greed and corruption.
Let’s hope that at least some of the foreigners who fleeced the US were British!
The lockdown policy and all associated policies were just a massive scam against citizens and taxpayers.
Will the guilty men in SAGE and Parliament EVER be held properly to account for their MALFEASANCE?
The German country of Schleswig-Holstein yesterday voted to re-direct funds from the covid money to help the 20.000 Ukrainian refugees in their country.
€400Million.
Now I am glad that they can re-direct money, but still, where the heck did they find €400Mill?
Similar fraud is now being made public in Germany, where it was even easier, as many private companies where able to set up PCR testing centres, and quite a few just upped their numbers of tests carried out.
Exactly what kind of a Government can oversee this whilst simultaneously tinkering with the state pension mechanism that would have substantially raised the derisory sum retirees are expected to exist on. Esentially they have enriched the very worst kinds of people at the expense of some of the poorest. Whoever signed off these loans should be held responsible and offer some kind of recompense…….