Sunak writes off £4,300,000,000 (4.3 billion) in fraudulent covid loans

Perhaps there were certain names on the applications,best not published ?

Was always going to be open to abuse.

I would love to get my hands on some  - thanking you in advance

I bet anyone on here would take some if they had the chance

In the mayhem I heard of people using old ltd companies that were defunct to apply for loans then scarpered

They were passing money out with literally no back checks

some people are a lot sharper and cleveristisher  than me - a plodder by comparison ho ho

Originally the banks were accountable for the scrutiny and verification. Of course you had the stream of associated socialists and others battering the government, claiming it was taking too long to access the money, people couldn't eat yadda yadda. The usual stuff. The treasury caved into the inevitable, and basically underwrote all the loans, with the treasury underwriting the liability. This was of course a green light to opportunists and fraudsters, which some of us pointed out at the time. We also stated the socialists would then be moaning about the government throwing away taxpayers' cash. Voila.

That's a lot of money, would hate to think I had to pay for that

You didn't even need a business bank account to get the money from HSBC.

£65 per person in the uk

Casually handed to fraudsters

Could pay a few gas bills with that

Not any more.

Can I have the link for this please?

If this is true what is the incentive for the businesses that took out real loans to pay the money back, or is it that bad that the banks haven't done due diligence and don't know who got the money?

Doesn't include tory donor start ups
selling ppe at inflated prices.

They essentially removed the due diligence, logikal. Argument being that speed was more important than guarding against fraud. This will be the same for all the schemes, the furlough fraud will be epic.

How do I apply for a Covid Bounce Back Loan?
Currently, only Starling Bank is accepting Bounce Back Loan applications from new customers. Every other bank has closed its doors, only accepting Bounce Back Loan applications from existing personal account holders.

Once you have chosen your lender from this list here, you will have to fill out a short online form self-certifying your business. There are no credit checks.

lol so you can still rinse money using Starling

the furlough fraud will be epic

Starmer and his team were fully behind Loans and Furlogh Billions being paid out to the Hideaways

Do I have to put up a personal guarantee?
Under the Bounce Back Loan Scheme (BBLS), lenders are not allowed to:

take any form of personal guarantee
take recovery action over the borrower’s personal assets (such as your main home or personal vehicle)

utterly laughable

Simon Calder just said mainline trains are being subsidised @ £1MILLION PER HOUR

while half the workforce are at home pretending to have passed someone on the other side of the road who had a cold.

So it is the fault of the lefties cider?

There were groups offering tidy sums for Ltd businesses with some semblence of accounting going back 6 months if I remember

could literally been a few hundred pounds going in or out for pretty much dead businesses.

Heard of one bank managaer touting for these too..

Easy money if you got no moral compass

Socialists, wd. Plenty of them pretendy Tories and business people.

The issue was implementing fukking lockdowns in the first place. Of course once they were done, there was inevitably going to be monumental demand for state assistance.

So it was the fault if socialists not The Party of Business

Why are the Part of Business raising taxes?

Why has the Party of Business increased the National Debt by over £400 Billion and kindly explain why that is the fault of socialists!

God help us all from Labour because The Party of Business, The Party of Law and Order and the Party of Government are so useless what will the lefties be like?

If think Labour = left and Tory = right, you're still living in the 1980's.

You were a great supporter of Doris and his mishandling of the pandemic cider

What has changed?

Lockdowns were implemented to save lives in the present. They came at a unknown cost.

(Once a vaccine was on the way, they were the only option)

Sunak writes off £4.3 Billion in fraudulent covid loans

What about

As I've stated a few times on here, politics is about the least worst option.

No lockdowns would have costs lives in the present , with unquantifiable benefits.

Which was the least worst option ?

Which was the only political solution ?

Not the only option either

£400 Billion increase in National Debt

What about Starmer drinking a bottle of beer

I'm referencing the parties/leaders who could win a GE.

Lockdowns were doomed to fail. It's only now people are beginning to realise that. But it's only just begun in my opinion.

Doris parties at number 10 the least worst option?

What about

Where has Doris lead?

What about Starmer drinking a bottle of beer?

£4.3 Billion of Tax Payer money written off?

Let’s have a party!

What about Starmer having a beer!

I can definitely see how people who thought that the 'rules' were needed, now feel stupid and humiliated. I never thought they were necessary, I never bought into the fear narrative. The civil service having parties when the had the country in lockdown doesn't surprise me in the slightest. I've also stated on here a few times, JHB has said all along that #10 didn't follow the rules, and most of the westminster bubble were fully aware, and participating on occasion.

Yep Parties at Number 10

What about the Civil Service!

What proportion of people working in #10 are elected?

That should help with the destroying the economy agenda.

All we can say is thank foook the other side didn't have hold of the purse strings , bad enough as it is .

The lefties the lefties

What about the lefties!

Bad case?

Do you think it is bad?

It is catastrophic

But let’s not worry about that

What about the lefties!

Ciders point, oh so predictably missed, is that the staff at these parties will have been mostly civil servants.
So it's not "what about the .." in addition to the parties, it's that "The civil servants ARE, with the addition of some SPADs, the people at these #10 parties and drinking wine on a friday afternoon".
It's not a bunch of Tory MPs sitting doing the day to day #10 admin work and so on.
Perhaps the fanatical Tory haters think it was? I bet they do. I mean it's not like they have a clue in general anyway..

My opinion, the situation will have been these people at the heart of government simply could not follow social distancing rules and do the job properly. This is central to the issue. That's why they all got covid, and there was a tangible risk to them and their families. It demonstrates the folly of the rules they got everyone else to follow. If they were interacting fully in an emergency situation, then it's not hard to see logic kicking in and seeing no harm in socialising together either. As in no additional risk in of itself. There is however an innate hubris there, arrogance, a lack of realisation of what everyone who believed the fear was going through.

In no way were the people who participated in this faultless. No way at all. But having been a leader of people, I can see how a sort of siege mentality developed and they actually saw themselves as different to everyone else, actually in bubble as it were. It is simply being used as political weaponry now. If your team was working very hard, had put themselves at risk, and were letting off steam would you have wanted to pour cold water on them. I think it should have been recognised personally, but not a hanging offence.

What was central to the issue is these are the people who made the laws and in charge is a dunce who thinks the laws do not apply to him.

Big Dog? my a*rse!

A coward who is still in hiding!

What about the civil Servants, its all their fault!

I didn't say it was all their fault. I'm stating there is mitigation. The primary issue is the ridiculous, inhuman, often impossible things they were telling everyone else to do in the first place. Led by SAGE (civil servants).

So Sage ran the Country not the Lefties?

What about that!

I have no idea what 'Lefties' have to do with this. In what world was advising close relatives to social distance at a funeral a legitimate thing to push? Or have mothers give birth on their own? This is at the heart of the issue, not whether people at #10 were regularly popping to their local Threshers.

So it is the fault of the lefties cider?


Socialists, wd. Plenty of them pretendy Tories and business people.

yep should always have been guidance or advice from day 1 not banning normal human activities by law. they got themselves in this mess by implementing inhumane, cruel and pointless regulations

This Govt really is the pits.

The armpits.

Mind you the 12 years of real terms pay cute for NHS heroes had to be spent on something.

What better than writing off the payments made in dodgy PPE contracts to Tory donors and chums?

I didn't say it was all their fault. I'm stating there is mitigation. The primary issue is the ridiculous, inhuman, often impossible things they were telling everyone else to do in the first place.

It was not so impossible for many people.not for the people who watched their loved ones die on Instagram, or people who saw their loved ones die through double glazed windows, or the people who missed relatives funerals or the people who died without getting a final hug from a son or daughter because of the rules Johnson set.

It was just impossible for the corrupt and odious Hooray Henries who made the rules to stick to them. Impossible because they have an inbuilt belief that there are one set of rules for the plebs and no rules at all for the corrupt and repulsive Conservative Government and their sleazy chums.

So yes there is mitigation. The mitigation is that it is unreasonable to expect odious corrupt sleazy old Etonian toffs to give a stuff about anyone else.

cryoftruth what is your opinion of Joseph Stalin?

A man has been given a six-year bankruptcy order after spending most of a £50,000 Covid loan on drugs.

Louis Glyn Maxwell, 35, obtained the Bounce Back Loan in August 2020 after overstating his projected income for his company, Mr Tow Recovery Logistics.

Mr Maxwell, from Newport, spent about £22,000 of the loan on a tow truck, but the rest on Class A drugs. He later sold the truck to buy more drugs.

He cannot borrow more than £500 without disclosing his bankrupt status.

He was the sole owner of Mr Tow Recovery Logistics, which was established in 2019 and operated in the Newport area, which he ran using a Jeep Cherokee and a trailer.









Bounce back better, unlucky getting caught before
they were written off...

Or just thick...


At the time he was serving convictions for driving offences which meant he was not allowed to drive.

He filed for bankruptcy in August 2021, triggering an Insolvency Service investigation.

On 18 January, UK government Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng accepted a six-year bankruptcy restrictions undertaking from Mr Maxwell.

Among other restrictions, he cannot act as a company director without the court's permission.

Sue Tovey of 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"

4.3 billion is a lot of money.

But of course the Tories doled out far more in bungs to their chums in the PPE scandal.even Handcock’s barman got a nice fat bung from the tax payers.

Why hasn't the Chancellor resigned over this?  Stands by and says nothing while his Treasuru minister takes all the responsibility for him and they talk about this incompetent fool becoming the next PM.

A Treasury minister who resigned over the government’s “schoolboy” handling of fraudulent Covid business loans has said there has been “not a zippo” of detail about how the chancellor plans to deal with the issue.
Theodore Agnew of Oulton, who was the Tories’ anti-fraud minister, publicly resigned from his Cabinet Office and Treasury posts on Monday over the government’s decision to write off £4.3bn in fraudulent loans. He called the oversight of the scheme “nothing less than woeful”.
Discussing his dramatic exit in an interview with the Times, Lord Agnew said: “I didn’t want to blow my top, but I was very angry.” Agnew accused the government of “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” in its attitude to tackling fraud estimated to cost £29bn a year.

Absolutely sparrow,

Too bus6 with party party. Heads should toll over this

It's about time we had good managers rather than politicians running the country.

Like in the NHS?

Right wingers now just want to talk about Ukraine and anything else that they haven't already made a complete mess of instead of concentrating on things that really matter to the people of this country.

This is hundreds, if not thousands of incompetents at the treasury ffs, not the politicians.

But I think you'll find that the mainstream media narrative is obsessed about deposing Boris Johnson. Which is actually, guess what, underpinned by more large scale civil service incompetence.

They really need to detach civil service government incompetence from political incompetence. When people use the term 'government', the vast majority of people assume it is only the politicians being referenced.

Being a former finance manager, and I was only managing circa £13 million monthly revenues, I can safely tell you any finance manager worth their salt would confirm that the final change they made to the bounce back loan scheme was going to invite thousands of fraudsters and scammers to try. The fact that they took away any credit checks, and all you needed was a business number, and self certify, absolutely absurd. So civil servants on six figure salaries, managing billions of pounds of tax payer cash certainly knew the scheme was going to be rinsed senseless.

The question is why they did it, and what mitigations they put into place to at least limit the basic attempts to defraud.

And there was me thinking the Chancellor of the Exchequer was responsible for the policy and why then did a Treasury minister resign as well over this?

A Treasury minister who resigned over the government’s “schoolboy” handling of fraudulent Covid business loans has said there has been “not a zippo” of detail about how the chancellor plans to deal with the issue.
Theodore Agnew of Oulton, who was the Tories’ anti-fraud minister, publicly resigned from his Cabinet Office and Treasury posts on Monday over the government’s decision to write off £4.3bn in fraudulent loans. He called the oversight of the scheme “nothing less than woeful”.
Discussing his dramatic exit in an interview with the Times, Lord Agnew said: “I didn’t want to blow my top, but I was very angry.” Agnew accused the government of “arrogance, indolence and ignorance” in its attitude to tackling fraud estimated to cost £29bn a year.

Civil servants indeed.....What a lot of codswallop.

Perhaps you should listen to he actually said, instead of the reporting of what he said.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TzDCmrWOr5Y

I can do better than that.......

Theodore Agnew was the model of a modern Tory oligarch. A successful businessman, he made enough to dabble in the new politics. He did all the right things. He backed a chain of academy schools and joined a Conservative thinktank, Policy Exchange. He donated a dutiful £134,000 to the Tory party between 2007 and 2009. Part-owner of an AI consultancy called Faculty, Agnew set it to work for Johnson’s Vote Leave campaign. He received a knighthood, then a peerage, and was then offered a ministerial post in Boris Johnson’s government, at the time being advised by the former Vote Leave director, Dominic Cummings. Faculty won a fistful of government contracts worth almost £1m. All in all, Agnew could feature in an Armando Iannucci satire on Boris’s Britain.

Then this week, Agnew went bang. Even he had had enough. In February 2020, he was given the Yes Minister title of “efficiency and transformation”, and in a speech on Monday in the House of Lords he was supposed to congratulate himself on his work. He had been one of the custodians of the £47bn of public money that had been dished out to private companies and banks in bounce-back loans between 2020 and 2021. However, of this sum, Agnew reckoned £17bn had been lost and at least £5bn of those losses were to fraud, or 1p on income tax. He clearly choked on the task asked of him. And then something unprecedented took place. A Johnson minister proceeded to tell the truth and resign on the spot.

The scheme had been chaos, he said. “Schoolboy errors” had been made by the Covid loans scheme, such as bounce-back loans being given to more than 1,000 companies that had not even been trading when Covid struck. As for the government’s 100% guarantee to banks that it would underwrite any losses, this had led to gross indiscipline by lenders. By the time checks came in to weed out fraudulent duplicate applications, 60% of the £47bn had already been paid out. Agnew estimated that a quarter of the money lost through the scheme would be down to fraudulent claims rather than credit failure. Many fraudsters had simply claimed the loans, then dissolved their businesses months later.

Agnew’s speech was scathing. He declared that the government’s record as guardian of the country’s resources was “desperately inadequate”. The business department and its cash-gushing British Business Bank (BBB) had been “woeful” in their oversight and auditing of the scheme. The Treasury had shown “no knowledge of, or little interest in” the level of fraud. Using his words with care, Agnew accused them of refusing to “lift their game”, even when warned of the scale of the scandal.

As for the resistance of the system to policing itself, the BBB, a government agency, would not even share fraud data with Agnew, the counter-fraud minister. A presumably desperate letter from Agnew to the bank released this week was sent on 16 December but went unanswered. The BBB fobbed off enquirers by saying it had been “held up in the House of Lords IT system”.

Agnew estimated that total fraud across the public sector now ran at £29bn a year, or about 5p on income tax. The bounce-back loan fraud is estimated to have cost a third of the annual revenue of the new national insurance levy of 1.25 per cent due in April.

Some picture of this scandal is already emerging from the mundane world of the courts, from crimes and insolvency records. A Manchester judge last week was reportedly aghast at bounce-back loans having been granted under Treasury guarantee to two serial fraudsters to the tune of £145,000. Loans went to known gangsters involved in expensive car theft. Other loans went into paying off gambling debts or into buying a £2,400 watch, according to the Times.

Clearly much of this money will have gone to deserving businesses caught out by lockdown and genuinely faced with bankruptcy. Most world governments caught up in the pandemic felt entitled to print money to relieve what was assumed to be temporary – and unprecedented – financial hardship. This mostly took the form of “helicopter money”, disbursed to those in the furlough scheme and totalling £70bn.

The bounce-back loan scheme was more like B-52 money. It carpet-bombed the ever murkier financial no man’s land that separates productive business and the City. The £47bn must explain why banks and other financial services survived the lockdown in remarkably healthy shape.

It would seem that Cummings’ “madhouse” extended far more widely across Whitehall than just Downing Street. It embraced the Treasury and the business department, in what appears to have been a conspiracy of high-spending anarchy. The chancellor, Rishi Sunak, has already responded by promising to do “everything we can to get that money back”. So far though, HMRC investigators have recovered a mere £536m of stolen money. While Agnew in his resignation speech was kind to the prime minister, he conspicuously did not mention Sunak. It is hard to escape the suspicion that his wrath was directly largely at the Treasury.

While Sunak has been desperate to distance himself from Johnson’s spendthrift tendencies, his leadership pitch, of seeking a responsible and fiscally stable Toryism, must be damaged by these revelations. When Covid is over, there is to be an awesome day of reckoning on many fronts. Ministers can reasonably protest that they faced a wholly exceptional crisis in 2020. From this, Britain emerged hesitantly at first but with some panache later on. Surely it should not suffer comparison with banana republics or kleptocracies?

Last November, the website Politico published a leaked list of 47 companies that were awarded PPE contracts early in the pandemic through the so-called VIP lane. These went mostly with no competition or serious checking of their often dubious qualifications. The list of those who referred companies to the scheme dripped with the names of Conservative ministers, MPs, peers and party donors (including Lord Agnew himself). According to the National Audit Office, clearly now a broken reed in Whitehall, this afforded them a 10-times better chance of a contract.

All British politics relies on clubs. To Alexis de Tocqueville it was this that saved democracy from the tyranny of the majority. The ties of friendship and mutual support that hold communities together also cohere political parties in their shared ideas and interests. Debts are generated, and it is probably as well they are honoured.

But such debts require absolute transparency and audit. Public trust depends on those put in charge of the nation’s wealth being seen to distribute it competently, openly and fairly. Coronavirus has been to many Britons a traumatic experience. The fury of the reaction to “partygate” shows the delicacy of the public mood. That the club of those in power should not just party while the nation suffers but should casually line its pockets and those of its friends is intolerable.

To this there can be only one answer: ruthless inquiry and, insofar as is possible, restitution. At very least, if Sunak knows what is good for him, his penance is to say goodbye to April’s stinging rise in national insurance.

While Sunak has been desperate to distance himself from Johnson’s spendthrift tendencies, his leadership pitch, of seeking a responsible and fiscally stable Toryism, must be damaged by these revelations.

You've quoted a piece, an interpretation of what he said. Try simply listening to what he said.

Where have I absolved Sunak of any responsibility?

However, SoS;s are effectively chairmen, they don't run the operations. I presume he expected the civil service, and multiple mandarins bagging near £million salaries to be competent enough not to give away the money to companies that were incorporated after the scheme was announced

The Treasury minister resigned and he's boss the chancellor should also have gone. Civil servants are not in charge of policy and not accountable to the people.

Are you trying to claim Sunak's policy was give £50K loans to businesses that were incorporated after the scheme was initiated?

What is/was your profession, sparrow?

Ok cider I bow to your superior knowledge as a former finance manager but why then did the Treasury minister resign if it had nothing to do with their policy.

Oh and by the way, I never realised I had to submit my CV to comment on this thread.

I didn't intend that question to sound arrogant or dismissive, is just that when you work with money professionally, you're aware of the level of scrutiny even small amounts require. Even for example, to sign off expenses.

The 'leaders' may come up with a strategy objective, but ultimately it's the people who are managing the operations who ensure the risk of anything untoward happening is mitigated. If there is a problem, you would 100% expect them to flag it up. Obviously there was political pressure with the amount of noise in the media about how long it was taking to get the money out to those busineses that had legitimate claims, so you could forgive some of the hurdles being temporarily removed. But they ended up just relying on people being honest, which is not credible.

I work with Australian businesses quite a lot these days. The schemes varied by state there, but generally you had to prove that your business lost turnover, and provide supporting evidence.

He resigned because he was being stonewalled by the civil service, which he articulated in his 'exit' speech in the HoL.

Everything points back to the absurd overreaction to covid, and the mass panic it engendered. No doubt all these treasury civil servants were all working from home, and all they cared about was an easy life. After all, it wasn't their money they were merrily dishing out to thieves and fraudsters.

Tories desperate to get Truss into frame so
the corruption gravy train can continue when
the clown is gone.

Let the bearded lady run the circus....