A contestant from The Apprentice ripped off a government Covid support scheme to the tune of £50,000.
The Bounce Back loan scheme was meant to help businesses struggling through lockdown by allowing them to claim a single loan of up to 25% of turnover.
Riyonn Farsad’s cookery company Middle Eastern Kitchen applied for and received 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.
The money was supposed to be used for the benefit of the company, but an Insolvency Service report states that £13,331 from the first loan and £15,249 from the second loan were pocketed by Farsad.
He 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”.
"Only a tiny proportion of civil investigations resulted in financial penalties being charged, meaning that the majority of those that did fraudulently claim on the schemes received no financial penalties," it says.
HM Revenue and Customs says the Taxpayer Protection Taskforce is on track to recover around £625million.
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