Restaurant owner ordered to repay £40,000 for Covid loan fraud

A restaurant owner has been jailed for almost three years and been ordered to repay almost £40,000 after using Covid business loans to clear personal debts.

 

Ilhan Kekec, who runs a kebab restaurant at a shopping centre in Forest Gate, London, obtained a £30,000 Covid Bounce Back Loan after overstating his company’s turnover to secure the loan in May 2020. 

 

Kekec falsely claimed the turnover of Hizirali Ltd was £125,000 when making the loan application. 

 

However, his new restaurant only traded for three weeks before the Covid lockdown, and he was unable to open during that period. 

 

He applied to dissolve Hizirali Ltd in June 2020, claiming it was no longer economically viable for him to run the restaurant, but he deliberately failed to inform his creditors he was in the process of dissolving the company.

 

Instead, the 36-year-old withdrew the Bounce Back Loan money in cash which he later admitted to the Insolvency Service he spent on clearing personal debts.

 

He was jailed for two-and-a-half-years following a trial at Isleworth Crown Court in March 2024.

 

At a confiscation hearing at the same court on Friday 20 December, he was ordered to repay a total of £37,426 within three months or face an additional 18 months in prison. 

 

Kekec was also ordered to pay £15,900 in costs and has been banned for three years to act as a company director.

 

He will still have to repay the loan should his prison sentence be extended. 

 

Alexander Grierson, head of asset recovery at the Insolvency Service, said: “Ilhan Kekec not only supplied false information to fraudulently acquire £30,000 in taxpayer funds at the start of the pandemic but then proceeded to use the loan to pay off personal debts. 

 

“This was not how the loans were supposed to be used and Kekec himself declared in his application that he would use the money for the economic benefit of his business.”

 

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