- Video game composer Peter Connelly has been jailed after fraudulently obtaining a second Covid Bounce Back Loan for his company
- Connelly, known for his work on Tomb Raider, inflated his company’s turnover during the first few months of the pandemic in 2020
- Insolvency Service investigations have also resulted in the 52-year-old being banned as a company director for six years
looks like it’s time for him to face the music
We’ll have to give him a moment to compose himself after that one
Hopefully he’ll sing a different tune after this conviction
Perfection
He did some sound design on Tomb Raider III and composed for The Last Revelation, Chronicles and Angel of Darkness. He wasn’t involved with any of the games people actually care about.
Appropriate, I guess. It is fraud. I just wonder for every person who gets convicted (have there been a lot?) there’s a bunch more, probably even larger companies who got away with a lot under the poorly regulated guise of government pandemic assistance.
The previous government wrote off billions in COVID-related fraud, and this guy got less than forty grand. Either there were millions of people defrauding the government, or the average incident involved much, much more money.
Maybe they should have taken a different route to maintain the economy. Which was the supposed point of these business loans (certainly there wasn’t a deeper plan to fleece the country) How could we have applied billions of those wasted dollars differently? Well, we determined we couldn’t give more than a few hundred dollars to all people directly because they would find a way to fake needing it, like they do welfare and voting and needing help, so yeah. I don’t know.
Most of the UK’s COVID fraud was from giving out contracts to companies that knew full well that they couldn’t deliver, e.g. a £40 million PPE contract to the landlord of the Health Secretary’s local pup, so it’s not absurd to claim that the point of those contracts wasn’t to save the economy, but rather transfer taxpayer money from the treasury to friends of Conservative Party leadership while there was still something left to loot. There was also lots lost in loans to fictional companies and furlough payments to fictional employees, of which a minority went to small businesses gaming the system, and a lot to organised crime gaming the system and then laundering the money so it couldn’t be traced and recovered (without giving the Serious Fraud Office and National Crime Agency enough budget to hire a workable number of forensic accountants).
I didn’t pay attention and now noticed it was a UK story, but isn’t it telling that it still was a common observance regardless of where you are. But I think the UK citizens got treated a bit better than the US, where $400 per household was going to break the country and was meant to cover rent and food for…months.
Guaranteed. We can only hope they face justice too. The more, the bigger, the better.
Loan Raider
