Surrey Director Receives Suspended Sentence for £100,000 Covid Loan Fraud

A company director from Surrey has not been jailed despite fraudulently channeling £100,000 in Covid-19 loan funds via his family’s bank accounts. Muhammadh Chaudhry first obtained a £50,000 Bounce Back Loan for a media enterprise in July 2020. He subsequently fraudulently acquired an additional £50,000 loan in September 2020 for UK Media Kit Hire Ltd, which he asserted operated as a film and TV production company. The Insolvency Service reported that the 41-year-old then moved these funds through savings accounts belonging to close family members. On Wednesday at Guildford Crown Court, Chaudhry received a two-year prison sentence, which was suspended for 22 months. Furthermore, he was disqualified from serving as a company director for a period of seven and a half years. Chaudhry, previously known as Masood Jamati, submitted his initial Bounce Back Loan application in early July 2020, falsely declaring an annual turnover of £200,000 as a sole trader. His subsequent application in September 2020 occurred only four days following his name change from Masood Jamati to Muhammadh Chaudhry. For UK Media Kit Hire, Chaudhry again asserted a turnover of £200,000, which represented the minimum figure businesses could state to qualify for the scheme’s maximum £50,000 loan. Investigators from the Insolvency Service discovered no indication that UK Media Kit Hire had ever conducted business operations. Funds from these loans were channeled through his family’s savings accounts before being returned to him and his wife, and subsequently withdrawn through multiple cash and cheque transactions. Bank analysis additionally indicated that money within the account funded holidays to Pakistan. Chaudhry, residing in Addlestone, fully repaid the UK Media Kit Hire loan earlier this year. He has also repaid £2,000 of the £50,000 loan obtained for the media business and agreed to settle the remaining balance. UK Media Kit Hire was formally dissolved in January 2021. Mark Stephens, chief investigator at the Insolvency Service, stated that Chaudhry “cynically invented” the turnover figure to secure Covid support for his business. He added, “These actions were clearly pre-planned and Chaudhry deliberately chose to take advantage of a taxpayer-backed scheme which was set up to support legitimate businesses during the pandemic.”