Taxpayers foot £640m bill for fraudulent loans8 Feb 2023 06:00
Worries mount over scale of losses at Covid bounce back schemes.
Loans that were potentially fraudulent accounted for close to £1 in every £6 paid by taxpayers to cover losses on a key pandemic finance scheme.
New official figures show that of the £4.1 billion the government has paid to lenders for defaulted credit under the bounce back loan scheme, £640 million worth of facilities were marked as “suspected fraud”.
The data also revealed:
Of the £77 billion worth of emergency taxpayer-backed funding provided across three pandemic loan schemes, at least £11 billion is in arrears or defaulted
Among large users of the bounce back loan scheme, Starling Bank has flagged the highest proportion of loans as “suspected fraud”. At least £695 million worth of the £1.6 billion in bounce back loans issued by the online bank are in arrears or default
Under a different pandemic scheme, Funding Circle, the listed small business lender, has been responsible for more than £1 in every £3 that has so far been claimed on the state guarantee.
On the smaller CBILs scheme, Funding Circle, the listed lending platform, has received £87.9 million from state guarantees across 706 defaulted loans. It represents close to two in five of all guarantee claims made on the scheme so far by number, and more than £1 in every £3 by value. NatWest, the largest user of the scheme, has been paid £27.7 million under the guarantee across 127 defaulted loans.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/taxpayers-foot-640m-bill-for-fraudulent-loans-jqz20frwp
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