Shohid Ahmed, 40, from Bradford, has been jailed for two years after securing £100,000 in bounce back loans loans that the business was not entitled to and using false information to secure the money.

Ahmed used his wife’s name to apply for three Covid bounce back loans during the pandemic and was accepted for two. These were both for a single business, Red Square Restaurants Limited, an Indian restaurant in Mirfield, in Kirklees in west Yorkshire.

To try to avoid being blamed for falsely claiming the emergency loans, Ahmed registered a tenant of his father’s as the director of Red Square Restaurants.

The innocent person was registered on New Year’s Day in 2020, but when asked by the Insolvency Service about her involvement, she told investigators she knew nothing about being appointed as director on the Companies House register