Matthew Temple Jailed for £150,000 Covid Loan Fraud

Key Points

• Matthew Temple got locked up for 2 years for grabbing three £50,000 Bounce Back Loans, even though his company had only qualified for a single one.
• An investigation found that Temple had spent £131,419 of the £150,000 on non-business things like £11,090 worth of bets 46 times in the space of a couple of weeks.
• Temple claimed nobody checked his second or third applications, while a 2021 audit highlighted the fact that they were too slow in sorting out safeguards against dodgy dealings.

How One Man Got Locked Up, Three Covid Loans And 46 Secret Bets

Three Covid loans, 46 secret bets & a few quid spent on some kids’ toys, you don’t get a much clearer picture of a prison sentence than that. Matthew Temple, 44, was finally brought to justice after being jailed for 2 years at Newcastle Crown Court on 23 Oct. The Insolvency Service reckons that Temple had frittered away £131,419 of the £150,000 he got, that’s the bulk of it. The question is where the rest of that cash ended up and whether the measures put in place to prevent these kinds of scams were doing their job properly.

Temple used to run Pizza Cottage (Whitley Bay) Limited, a popular takeaway on East Parade in Whitley Bay. At the time of the dodgy dealings, his name was Mehdi Ghaneh Keisami. The company was the proud owner of a Bounce Back Loan worth £50,000, which it got as soon as the scheme opened up in May 2020. Just three days later, he went back for more with a second application and said the cash would be used for the business, which was a lie. He did the same thing a month later when he applied for a third loan. On each occasion, he said it was the company’s only application and that the cash would be used to benefit the business.

Temple has already admitted to three charges of fiddling the system and made a full confession at the North Tyneside Magistrates Court in September. Before his case was finally wrapped up, the authorities had already done a civil investigation which ended up with a ban of 12 years from being a company director. You can imagine that was quite a blow to his business. Pizza Cottage had been around for almost four years before the loan scheme started, so it wasn’t some fly-by-night operation that was only set up to grab some cash. Six years and five months went by from when the first loan went in to the day he got locked up.

So, Where Did The Missing Cash Go?

£131,419 is roughly 88% of the total amount Temple borrowed. That’s a pretty big chunk of cash. £11,090 of that was spent on betting, in just 46 transactions over the space of less than two weeks. It seems like the cash was being blown at an alarming rate, roughly £241 per transaction. These transactions all took place in July 2020, just after that third loan came in. The company had bank accounts but most of the cash was being siphoned off in a very short space of time.

Another interesting thing turned up in the investigation. In May 2020, just one day after getting its first lot of cash, £264 got blown on some kids’ toys and play equipment. I mean who does that?

“They didn’t check it either”: an admission which passes an audit

When Temple was interrogated concerning his second application for a loan, he stated:

“I know it was my fault, I shouldn’t… I should tell them it was my second, but they didn’t check it either.”

His answer was both a confession of his fault and pointed to the flaws in the system at the same time. Nevertheless, the assumption that lenders neglected checking the application is irrelevant in this case. He confessed his guilt and pleaded guilty to all three charges of fraud.

There were flaws in the safeguards of the scheme; however, the situation was even more complex than in Temple’s statement. Thus, in December 2021, the National Audit Office found that the scheme lacked any verification procedures and credit checks. The launch of the scheme took place on 4 May 2020; the first loan of £50,000 arrived in the company’s account in two days. At the same time, lenders had to perform the fraud checks and know-your-client checks starting from May 2020. These checks were supposed to be the primary safeguard against fraud.

A special system of duplicate application checks appeared in June 2020; however, by that time lenders had already granted 61% of loans by value. Temple applied for a second loan three days after receiving the first one, well before the duplicate check system was established. It is not clear from the public record whether the new system of checks covered Temple’s third application made in June.

In March 2021, the government assessed fraud in loans in the amount of 11%, which is worth £4.9 billion. Nevertheless, auditors called the estimate highly uncertain, pointing to the exclusion of inflated turnover cases.

A Second Gambling Case Takes a Very Different Turn

Temple isn’t the only director of a company who’s got himself into trouble with loan money after a trip to the casino. Back in October 2025, another company director, this time from a glazing firm, got sentenced for fiddling the books to get a second £50k loan. Both cases involved applying for a second loan, which is why this is worth taking a closer look at.

The glazing company case is a bit of a doozy. It seems the director had been siphoning off more than £25k to his personal account, and then sending it on to various bookies. The court was pretty hard on him: 22 months in the clink, suspended for 2 years, and on top of that, he’s got to cough up £40k in compensation. The Insolvency Service’s Chief Investigator David Snasdell was pretty clear that he’d be keeping an eye out for anyone taking advantage of the system.

Now, when it comes to Temple’s case, the fella who’s just started a 2-year stretch, the differences between the two start to show up pretty quickly. On the surface of it, it looks like the 2025 case involved a larger sum of cash, around £25k compared to Temple’s £11k, and the release doesn’t give us any idea why the judges made the sentencing call that they did. There are a few pretty clear differences between the two cases, mind: Temple, for a start, went and got himself three loans. And on top of that, back in 2024 he’d already gotten himself banned from being a company director for 12 years.

Recovery On The Cards, Still Plenty Of Questions Hanging In The Air

Temple’s 2-year prison sentence is just the start of things for him. The Insolvency Service is also out to get their hands on the cash he’s managed to swindle under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. Snasdell made it clear that this is just the beginning: “Getting a conviction is just the beginning, we’ve got a whole lot more work to do”. Yet again, we’re still waiting on a figure for how much they’re hoping to recover, and there’s no real idea when things might actually start moving. And then of course there’s the 12-year ban from being a company director, which should keep him out of the boardroom well into the 2030s.

Now there are a fair few other bits of the story that we’re not getting the full picture on, yet. We don’t know how much of that cash Temple’s managed to pay back, for one. And even though the company’s now got a “liquidated” tag on it with Companies House, that doesn’t tell us much about whether the takeaway is still trading or not. And what about the lenders who signed off on those loans, are we talking one bank, or three separate ones? We don’t even get that information out of the release.

The Dark Side of the Gambling Figures

Our take on this is that gambling gets everyone’s attention because people love to be able to have a go at knocking it. But the £11,090 linked to gambling is actually just a tiny fraction of the much bigger problem, £131,419 that was essentially frittered away on non-business stuff. And let’s not forget the kids’ toys that got bought the very next day the first loan came in, that’s a pretty clear sign that personal spending was already in full swing almost the minute the cash arrived.

We think it’s also worth taking a closer look at how the scheme was set up. The auditors were pretty blunt, saying there wasn’t much to check, no proper credit checks were done and the system for spotting duplicate applications was pretty useless by the time most of the cash had been handed out. And on the lenders’ side, they had some responsibilities but the government guarantee didn’t exactly give them a lot of incentive to bother with the paperwork. None of that lets someone who pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud off the hook, but we can’t say for sure whether a bit more scrutiny would have stopped them getting their third loan.

Looking at the overall picture, Temple’s £150,000 is a tiny drop in the ocean compared to the estimated £4.9 billion in total fraud. Even if the numbers don’t add up exactly, his share is still an incredibly small fraction, 0.003% if you believe the figures. Maybe the real test of all this will be how much cash the authorities actually manage to recover. If the end figure ends up being a long way below £150,000 then that’ll say a lot more about the outcome than the fact he got a custodial sentence will.

There’s also the nagging question that the release didn’t answer though: did any of the operators have a nagging feeling that there was something fishy about the gambling transactions? 46 payments from a business account in a couple of weeks is enough to make you wonder if anyone raised any red flags. Now, we’re not accusing anyone of any wrongdoing, there’s nothing in the case that suggests that. But it’s worth asking the question just for the sake of it, it can’t hurt to ask after all and might be useful in future cases.

A prison sentence holds one bloke to account for his actions, but the fact remains that two dodgy declarations still managed to shovel £100,000 out of the system in a matter of weeks.