IT consultant-cum-developer in court over hiding COVID-19 loan UK government is kissing goodbye to the £100,000 an IT consultant-cum-software developer wrongly secured under the Bounce Back Loans scheme that was created during the pandemic to financially support firms. Bounce Back Loans (BBL) were offered to small and medium sized businesses from May 2020 until March 2021, allowing them …
"It seems that Jastrzebski's case is going to add this to the ever growing list of both financial misconduct and fraud committed by scumbags that exploited the pandemic. It is estimated that £21 billion ($25.96 billion) of public money was lost to fraud, according to the National Audit Office."
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice and you have a display of stunning incompetence and probably significant collusion. Just as long the National Audit Office is not using Horizon software. They aren't, are they?
From their website:
We support Parliament in holding the government to account and we help improve public services through our high-quality audits.
They seem to be doing neither.
Seldom Functioning Office is another one that just takes takes payer money to do very much nothing of substance.
You read the media headlines
And
I am sure we are educated to not do this
But
The rich and successful do it all the time
CEO drops the ball wrecks the business and gets a golden parachute into their next job
Crime does pay it appears
We shall see him as head of something oh I don’t know like the post office in a couple of years
We got a bounce-back loan and it was a life saved for our business, but what astonished us at the time was how easy & fast it was. In retrospect we see what that lead to! At least our business was up and running months before the scheme started, but it also appears many got the loan having started afterwards which is such a dumb decision from a fraud point of view...
I know people who saw it as free cash, an opportunity not to be missed, a chance to have money which is usually only funnelled into the pockets of the elite and pals of the government.
Everyone knew it was going to be exploited, including the government. It was simply another giveaway of tax payer money orchestrated by the party in power.
"We got a bounce-back loan and it was a life saved for our business, but what astonished us at the time was how easy & fast it was."
I think that was the point. Right or wrong the decision was taken to smash the economy with a sledgehammer and that would leave a lot of people in dire situations. Fraud was bound to happen but people needed help instantly as soon as the economy was to grind to a halt.
People needed help, and Sunak's press conferences and presentations somehow failed to mention that that help failed to arrive to 3.8 million taxpayers while people who didn't need support pocketed that loan money and disappeared.
@AC
"Sunak's press conferences and presentations somehow failed to mention that that help failed to arrive to 3.8 million taxpayers "
I can believe it. Governments can take months and years of planning to create a system that manages to miss people it should serve, but this was a rush job for an imminent economic shutdown. In this case people needed help because the gov decided to shut down the economy. It was a rushed job to create a government solution to a government created problem with little warning. About the only thing they really got right was the vaccine procurement and distribution.
Read the comments about the help for freelancers does not include the first quarter, no help available for people who had started a new job, no help available for company directors, no help available for people who pay business rates to their landlord who then pays them on their behalf, no help available for people on rolling temporary contracts, denying people help because they were "a fraud risk" when MPs' friends have walked off with millions, etc... these problems were identified by people and deliberately left unaddressed by the Tory government. Yet many similar countries could spin up more comprehensive coverage, quicker.
Constant failure to invest in IT or typical Toryism that goes all the way back to the Poor Laws where the "undeserving poor" must be found and punished for being poor - why not both?
And now happily in this election year they will reap what they have sown.
By the way, did the British government create the pandemic? No, so it wasn't a government-created problem.
@AC
"By the way, did the British government create the pandemic? No, so it wasn't a government-created problem."
The government didnt create the pandemic, but the government did cause and enforce the lockdowns (for others of course). The government chose to stall the economy.
Labour did pass the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 which allowed for local delegation. The conservative government later argued that if they didn't use it then it meant it wasn't fit for purpose, but but others argue that it was mostly right, had sensible limitations on powers, and could have been easily amended for Covid instead of drawing up a whole new act.
Incorporated October 2019, nicked £100k of public funds (arguably the system was at fault for allowing a company to make duplicate claims for this bounce-back loan) and the business paid out £500k to third parties in about a year - less the loans, that's £400k paid out from a one-man software and consulting business in what was pretty much the first year of trading - and then wound up the company. What's the odds that these 'third parties' were somehow related to Jastrzebski and that there's a number of suppliers who are also out of pocket over this?
Upshot: he's walked off with a ton of funds and got away with it. Been banned from running a business in the UK for 13 years though so that'll teach him not to try that trick again, I have no doubt. </sarcasm>
It will also put a dent in any IT career where there is pre-employment screening. Being banned from being a director will disqualify you from an IT job at a bank for a start, probably a whole bunch of other industries too. I don't know if he'll find the money "worth it" in the long run, but he may well have got off lightly in the process.
"Upshot: he's walked off with a ton of funds and got away with it. Been banned from running a business in the UK for 13 years though so that'll teach him not to try that trick again, I have no doubt."
At least he's been punished, even it it was an ineffectively weak smack on the wrist.
Bigger crooks in the COVID scandals are still unscathed - that awful Lady Mone for one.
If only we could ban crooked/corrupt politicians from public life for 13+ years as easily as this petty criminal was banished.
Shell company, one takes the loan and later folds; other "sells" an E-book to the shell and pays out in full.
I do not jest. The Individual Learning Account scheme of the late 1990's was abused horrendously in such a manner to print money. A good idea for actual students, but execution so full of obvious loopholes that rafts of businesses were founded to exploit them.
I chose to liquidate my company instead, due to my advancing (does it ever do anything otherwise?) age, and rely on the parliamentary assurances given by the PM "other sources of support".
After a much longer delay I was refused those sources of support (Universal Credit), because "the law doesn't allow us to give it to you". And that was the full explanation I was given. Perhaps I should have taken the loans and fled to Yorkshire, nobody gets extradited from Yorkshire.
The trick with Universal Credit is its branding and not a description. It’s actually upsettingly effective. After years of careful study, reasonable debate and focused campaigning, the “living wage” movement was utterly scuppered by the rebrand of the minimum wage.
It’s more and more evident to me that Feudalism never went away, it was just obfuscated. We are certainly much richer than the historical serfs, with a higher standard of living (in most cases), but we are serfs nonetheless
my gut feeling is it won't happen, because half a milion is 'not enough' to start the process. Especially if you have 253634 similar cases, plus the whole idea that the system was scammed so easily and so broadly makes uncomfortable news, so it's best to bury it.
Yet the prime minister has decided to focus on (again).harassing the disabled and particularly the mentally ill (making them worse due to the stress of knowing the govt is intent on slashing the little support they get and whipping up a media firestorm over virtually non existent "fraud" and "over medicalising" (talking points straight from the DWP best buddy the us health insurer unum formerly unum provident (the links between unum and UK welfare cuts are LEGION and make for enraging reading, Unum being the second worst health insurer behind allstate, both apparently using Deny, delay and defend tactics to avoid paying out claims, an approach eagerly adopted by the DWP more and more.)
Seems he is intent on wrecking what's left of the welfare system before he is removed from office. Like a spoiled child, if he can't have something then he will throw a strop and make sure EVERYONE else suffers as much as possible and will break as much as he can to stop anyone else getting anything. Petty, vindictive, beyond childish and downright sickening and worse the BBC is parroting his nonsense "why are so many on the sick"
Yet surveys of voters say this culture war crap and harassing the disabled turns them off candidates who delve into hate stirring
> Seems he is intent on wrecking what's left of the welfare system before he is removed from office. Like a spoiled child
Nah. This is the same centuries old Tory punish-them-for-being-poor ideology. In this specific case, they've been doing this since they returned to power in 2010. They long ago wore out any benefit of the doubt that they were running the welfare system in a malicious fashion in order to punish those who depended upon it.
The Tories have always relied upon a "them and us" narrative. Notice how often they parrot the phrase "hard working [people]" whenever they want to (e.g.) justify cutting taxes supposedly to help those "hard working [people]"- the implication being that there are the "others" those who *aren't* "hard working", that those unlucky enough to be poor or disabled are lazy spongers and parasites on the state. Never mind that the Tories don't really give a toss about the working poor or that their proposed tax cuts always seem- on examination- to mainly benefit those on much higher incomes.
Sunak might be returning to the well of divide-and-rule pandering to the Tory-inclined that voted for them last time in order to shore up their slim chance of political survival at the next election, but this isn't new.
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