STAR’S £50K LOAN SCAM
A contestant from The Apprentice ripped off a government Covid support scheme to the tune of £50,000.
The Bounce Back loan scheme allowed businesses to get a single loan of up to 25% of turnover to help them through lockdown.
Riyonn Farsad’s cookery company Middle Eastern Kitchen got a £25,000 loan in July 2020 and two months later got a second one for the same amount.
He claimed the firm had a £100,000 turnover at the time, when it had not even started trading.
The company has since folded, leaving the £50,000 total outstanding.
Farsad has now been banned from being a company director for 11 years, the Insolvency Service stating that he made what it politely calls “false representations” to get the money.
The 34-year-old from Balham, South London, was in The Apprentice in 2019, getting fired in episode five and told by Lord Sugar: “You have lost five times, I think there’s a clue there somewhere.”
His ban comes as a report reveals huge failings by the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce, which was set up by Rishi Sunak in March 2021 to recover money lost or defrauded through Covid support schemes.
The Taskforce is due to shut down next year, leaving at least £3.3billion unrecovered that was wrongly paid out, according to the campaign group TaxWatch.
It will have collected less than a quarter of the money lost to fraud and error across the furlough scheme, Eat Out to Help Out, and the self-employment income support scheme, TaxWatch claims.
The group also attacked the “very limited punishment” handed out to cheats, which create “little deterrent effect”.
HM Revenue and Customs says the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce is on track to recover around £625million.