A Bradford man who fraudulently obtained £100,000 in Covid support loans using his wife’s name and fabricated company documents has been ordered to repay £123,000 — more than five years after pocketing funds his business was never entitled to claim.
Shohid Ahmed, 41, of Bardsey Crescent, Bradford, applied for three maximum-value Bounce Back Loans totalling £150,000 in May and June 2020 on behalf of Red Square Restaurants Limited, which traded as Ruby’s Lounge on Huddersfield Road in Mirfield. He used his wife’s name on the applications because she held a better credit history. Two of the three loans were approved, delivering £100,000 into accounts connected to the business. In the nearly six years since, only £15,000 has been repaid.
The deception extended well beyond the loan applications themselves. Ahmed filed documents with Companies House falsely naming a woman — who had no connection to the business and had simply rented a property from his father — as the company’s director, appointed on New Year’s Day 2020. Ahmed described himself in those documents as a waiter earning £12,000 a year, while claiming the named woman had managed the restaurant, taken out the loans and controlled the accounts. The woman confirmed she knew nothing of it.
To further conceal where the money had gone, Ahmed produced a fabricated invoice purporting to show £15,000 had been spent on refurbishments carried out by an interior design firm in Stockton-on-Tees. Investigators from the Insolvency Service found the address was occupied by a café that had traded there for 37 years. Neither the café nor the building’s landlord had any knowledge of the design company.
The fraud was compounded by a direct contradiction in Ahmed’s own filings. In April 2020 — just weeks before submitting the loan applications claiming the restaurant was actively trading — he had applied to have the company struck off the Companies House register, stating it had not traded for three months.
Ahmed pleaded guilty to offences under the Fraud Act 2006, Companies Act 2006 and Insolvency Act 1986, and was sentenced to two years in prison at Bradford Crown Court in May last year. He had previously been disqualified as a company director for 11 years in December 2021 for the same misconduct.
At a further hearing at Bradford Crown Court on 12 March, Ahmed was handed a confiscation order of £123,000 plus costs of £6,000. He has three months to pay. Should he fail to do so, he faces an additional 15 months in custody — though the debt will remain outstanding regardless.
Alexander Grierson, Head of Asset Recovery at the Insolvency Service, said the confiscation order carried a clear message. “Those who steal from the public purse should be in no doubt that we will come for the fraudulently-obtained money,” he said, adding that “a prison sentence is not the end of the matter.”
A restaurant currently operates from the same address under a different name. Ahmed is not a director of that company.
