Nine Covid loans, five companies, £450,000 and a question nobody should ignore
During the Covid pandemic, we were repeatedly told that the Government had acted at speed to get financial support to businesses that desperately needed it.
The urgency was understandable. Businesses were closing, staff were being furloughed and entire sectors of the economy were effectively shut down overnight.
But speed came with a price.
The Bounce Back Loan Scheme was designed to get money into the hands of struggling businesses quickly, with the Government providing a 100% guarantee to the banks. That meant the taxpayer ultimately carried the risk when loans were not repaid. That’s us, we paid in, we received little or no Covid financial support and now we are paying for the fraud of scammers like this Shifty Grifter!!
So when somebody manages to obtain nine separate £50,000 loans, worth a combined £450,000, by making false declarations across five companies, the obvious question is not simply how dishonest the borrower was.
It is this:
Who was checking?
And, perhaps more importantly, what checks were being carried out by the banks before £450,000 of taxpayer-backed money was released?
The case of London hotelier Richard Courtenay provides an uncomfortable answer.
Nine applications in less than two months
Courtenay, 62, has now been sentenced after admitting a series of fraud offences connected with the Bounce Back Loan Scheme.
Between 7 May and 25 June 2020, he made nine applications, each for the maximum £50,000 available under the scheme.
Together, they produced £450,000.
The applications related to five companies:
- Hotel Belgravia Limited
- Belgravia Rooms Limited
- Lebex Limited
- Directlingua Limited
- Belgravia Accommodation Ltd
The problem was that the applications contained false information.
Courtenay overstated company turnover, obtained more than one Bounce Back Loan for the same business and then diverted money away from the companies for purposes that had nothing to do with running them.
Some of the money went directly into his own bank accounts.
Some was transferred to other companies.
Some was paid to associates.
Some was used to acquire cryptoassets.
This was not simply a case of a struggling business borrowing money and subsequently finding itself unable to repay it.
The court heard that the applications themselves contained dishonest declarations.
The first £50,000
The first application concerned Hotel Belgravia Limited, a company incorporated only in January 2020, with Courtenay as its sole director.
He declared annual turnover of £500,000.
Yet dormant accounts were subsequently filed for the company in December 2020.
The £50,000 loan did not remain within the company.
By the end of May 2020, the money had been moved into the accounts of another company, Lebex Limited, and two associates.
Three days later, another application was submitted.
This time it was for Belgravia Rooms Limited.
The declared turnover was £400,000.
The £50,000 was again transferred into Courtenay’s personal accounts.
And then, remarkably, the process happened again.
Exactly one month later, another £50,000 Bounce Back Loan application was submitted for the same company.
The turnover figure remained £400,000.
The application also contained a declaration that the company had not already received a Bounce Back Loan.
It had.
That brought the total obtained so far to £150,000.
Another £200,000
Lebex Limited then became the vehicle for a further four applications.
Courtenay obtained £200,000 from four different banks.
The declared turnover figures were not even consistent.
Depending on the application, turnover was stated to be £600,000, £500,000 and £400,000.
Again, he declared that the company had not already received a Bounce Back Loan.
Again, the money was obtained.
And again, the funds were subsequently moved elsewhere.
Investigators found that money was transferred into Courtenay’s personal accounts and to other businesses. Some was also used to purchase cryptoassets.
At that point, five applications alone had produced £250,000.
There were still more to come.
A teaching company and a property business
Directlingua Limited was described as an online teaching platform.
For that company, Courtenay declared turnover of £400,000.
The company’s financial position, however, was starkly different. It had little more than £14,000 in cash.
Nevertheless, another £50,000 was obtained.
It too was used for personal purposes.
Then came Belgravia Accommodation Ltd.
Courtenay was not its registered director, but he instructed one of the directors to make the application.
The declared turnover was £250,000.
Another £50,000 was secured.
Once again, the money ended up in Courtenay’s own account and that of an associate.
Nine applications.
Five companies.
£450,000.
All within a matter of weeks.
A complicated web of companies
Courtenay later attempted to explain the relationships between the businesses by describing his arrangements as being clear in theory but becoming confused in practice.
Lebex Limited held leases on adjoining hotel buildings in Belgravia which were operated together as the Belgravia Rooms hotel business.
Belgravia Rooms Limited operated the hotel and paid rent to Lebex.
Hotel Belgravia Limited had subsequently been incorporated after Belgravia Rooms Limited acquired a poor credit rating following a county court judgment.
There were also flats in and around central London being advertised through Airbnb, with the associated expenditure intended to run through Belgravia Accommodation Ltd.
Directlingua was an online teaching operation.
On paper, there were several different companies.
In reality, Courtenay was closely connected to all of them.
And the Bounce Back Loan money moved between them.
“I assumed the banks would check”
Perhaps the most extraordinary part of the case came when Courtenay attempted to explain his actions.
When interviewed under caution by the Insolvency Service, he answered questions with “no comment”.
In a prepared statement, he denied being dishonest.
He claimed that he believed the turnover figures he had supplied were accurate, while acknowledging that he had not actually checked them.
He also said he did not realise that businesses were restricted to one Bounce Back Loan.
That restriction was expressly stated on the application form.
Courtenay’s position was also that he expected the banks to carry out their own checks.
He blamed the banks for not pursuing him more aggressively when repayments were not made.
There is an extraordinary irony here.
A taxpayer-backed emergency loan scheme was deliberately designed to be fast.
Yet when the money was obtained through false declarations, the borrower appears to have regarded the responsibility for checking those declarations as belonging to somebody else.
The taxpayer was ultimately repaid
Courtenay has now repaid the full £450,000.
But there is an important qualification.
He did not repay it because the loans had simply been responsibly serviced.
He repaid the money after the Insolvency Service began investigating his conduct.
That distinction matters.
The fact that taxpayers ultimately recovered the £450,000 does not erase what happened to obtain it.
Nor does it answer the bigger question about how the money was released in the first place.
The sentence
Courtenay pleaded guilty in July 2026 to nine counts of fraud and one count of money laundering.
On Thursday 3 September, Southwark Crown Court sentenced him to three years in prison, suspended for three years.
He was also ordered to undertake 150 hours of unpaid work and complete 10 days of rehabilitation activity.
Three years is the maximum prison sentence that can currently be suspended.
David Snasdell, Chief Investigator at the Insolvency Service, said the number of applications made in such a short period demonstrated the determination involved in exploiting a scheme which was vulnerable to fraud.
He also criticised Courtenay’s limited remorse and his decision to blame the banks.
That criticism is understandable.
But it leaves another question hanging in the air.
Who was actually checking?
The Government needed to move quickly during the pandemic.
Nobody disputes that.
But there is a difference between moving quickly and removing meaningful safeguards.
The Bounce Back Loan Scheme placed enormous sums of public money behind loans issued by commercial banks.
Businesses could borrow up to £50,000, subject to the scheme’s rules, with the Government guaranteeing the loans.
That was supposed to help legitimate businesses survive an unprecedented economic crisis.
Instead, cases such as this demonstrate how the system could be exploited.
Courtenay did not obtain £450,000 from a single application.
He made nine applications to secure nine maximum-value loans.
He used five companies.
He supplied different turnover figures.
He applied more than once for the same company.
He falsely declared that previous loans had not been received.
And significant amounts of the money were moved away from the businesses and into personal accounts, other companies and cryptoassets.
The sheer sequence of events raises questions that go beyond one individual’s criminal behaviour.
How many checks were actually being performed before these loans were approved?
How many applications were cross-checked between banks?
How easy was it to identify that the same individual was behind multiple companies?
And how much of the money that was fraudulently obtained was never recovered?
These are not insignificant questions.
They concern public money.
Remember when we were told we were the fraud risk?
During the pandemic, ordinary people were repeatedly expected to follow rules, provide information, prove their circumstances and accept restrictions on their lives.
Businesses that genuinely needed help were asked to trust a system which was supposed to get money to them quickly.
The Bounce Back Loan Scheme was an extraordinary emergency measure created under extraordinary circumstances.
But emergency does not have to mean blind.
When somebody can obtain £450,000 through nine applications, using five interconnected companies and false declarations, before investigators eventually intervene, it is entirely legitimate to ask whether the problem was solely the person committing the fraud.
Or whether the system itself created an opportunity that should have been much harder to exploit.
Richard Courtenay has been convicted and sentenced. That part of the story is now settled – well if one can call it settled given how lightly he has escaped!
3 year suspended sentence, 150 hours community service.
Meanwhile …
Who was vetting the applications, and how did nine £50,000 loans slip through the net?
