‘My boss kept my furlough money while I struggled’

Ex-councillor among thousands facing subsidy mismanagement claims, reports Harry Brennan

Aformer Tory councillor who stepped down after making racist comments has been accused of placing an employee on furlough while withholding his wages and retaining thousands of pounds in government subsidies, Telegraph Money can disclose.

HM Revenue & Customs has confirmed that it will be looking into reports that Richard Maurin, chief executive of property firm Charles Hope Apartments, mismanaged the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme and left his employee struggling to make ends meet at a difficult time. HMRC is looking into more than 3,000 similar reports of mismanagement of the furlough programme, which covers up to 80pc of workers’ wages via state grants. There is no suggestion that the tax authority has opened an official investigation into Mr Maurin.

Jose Torres, the employee who made the allegations, has also begun employment tribunal proceedings. He has worked as the deputy manager of a Charles Hope Apartments site, a lettings property based in Birmingham’s Chinatown, for around 18 months.

Mr Torres said that, after he was told that he would be placed on furlough in March, Mr Maurin withheld his wages. The 29-year- old single father, originally from Portugal, said without any income he was struggling to pay his rent and provide food and pay for child support for his young daughter. He insisted he did not receive any income from April to June.

Text messages between the two men, seen by this newspaper, suggest Mr Torres sent repeated pleas to Mr Maurin to transfer his wages over several days in the middle of April, but many of the messages went unanswered.

Birmingham Peoples Centre, a charity that offers free employment advice, attempted to broker a settlement between the two parties earlier this month, but Mr Maurin declined to agree to hand over the unpaid wages. Within hours of this newspaper contacting Mr Maurin about the allegations, Mr Torres received almost £4,000 in his bank account from Loder Properties, another property business connected to Mr Maurin, registered in his wife’s name.

Mr Maurin, who also goes by the name of Richard Powell or Rikki Lee Powell, was a Conservative councillor in Bournemouth before he stepped down in 2010 after reports that he had sent a series of texts to friends that included crass jokes containing racist language. He later ran a coach company but was disqualified in 2016 for mismanagement. There were reports, including a feature on the BBC’s Inside Out, suggesting that he had failed to

pick up passengers and refused to pay refunds.

Mr Maurin said that in spite of four requests from his external HR advisers, Mr Torres had failed to sign a letter consenting to be placed on furlough. Following his advisers’ guidance, he said, he had therefore held on to the employee’s wages. He said he had since taken legal advice and handed over the money, while continuing to ask for the letter to be signed.

He said: “Rightly or wrongly, that’s what’s been done. We have taken advice in good faith and followed that. I would like to point out that this is a new scheme aimed at assisting companies to retain staff, [and the] guidance has been changed multiple times. We have done what we believe to be correct to comply with all conditions of the scheme.” He added that the dispute would be dealt with at tribunal.

Mr Torres said he had never received a letter or consent form from his employer.

HMRC said it had received 3,079 complaints relating to the furlough scheme by the middle of June and confirmed it was looking at each one.

New laws will from next month allow the tax authority to pursue any businesses and directors to have misused the scheme, including those who have claimed government grants on employees’ behalf without their knowledge and kept the money, and those who have forced employees to continue to work while on furlough.