Sehrish Yasmin fraudulently secured two £50,000 Bounce Back Loans during the pandemic.
A restaurant manager who used a fraudulent Covid Bounce Back Loan to buy herself £12,000 of jewellery has been handed a suspended sentence.
Sehrish Yasmin, aged 32, applied for a £50,000 loan of behalf of Manny Steak House on Wilmslow Road, Manchester, in May 2020.
She then secured a second £50,000 Bounce Back Loan for the same company just one month later.
However, businesses were only entitled to a single loan under government rules.
Money from the loan could only be used to benefit the business, but Yasmin spent more than £12,000 in the Jewellery Quarter in Birmingham.
She was sentenced to 10 months in prison, suspended for 12 months, at Manchester Crown Court on 16 May, and ordered to pay costs and compensation of £5,000 within 28 days.
Yasmin, of Grasmere Road, Cheadle, Greater Manchester, was meant to have started repaying each loan one year after receiving the money, but only started to do so once Insolvency Service investigations began in December 2022.
David Snasdell, chief investigator at the Insolvency Service, said: “Bounce Back Loans were introduced by the government to help small and medium-sized businesses survive during the Covid pandemic.
“Sehrish Yasmin exploited this taxpayer-backed scheme by applying for two loans when businesses were only entitled to one and compounded this by spending significant sums on jewellery.
“While we are of course pleased that Yasmin has finally acknowledged her wrongdoing and repaid the two loans in full, we are disappointed that this only happened following our extensive investigations into her fraudulent activities.”
Yasmin, who is also a qualified nurse, committed a further offence when Manny Steak House was liquidated in May 2021 by not delivering books and records to the liquidator when requested.
The government is continuing to clamp down on Covid loan fraud. In March, the owner of a Turkish restaurant was jailed after he tried to dissolve his company after illegally applying for a £30,000 Bounce Back Loan.