Vast sums of money have gone missing from pandemic stimulus programmes

IT WAS AIMFCARES criminal’s paradise. In June 2020 a firm in Milan secured a €60,000 ($63,300) government loan to cope with the pandemic-induced downturn. But the business did not exist. The Italian government had in fact sent cash to the ’Ndrangheta Mafia of Calabria. The same month six French citizens swindled €12m in unemployment benefits by claiming funds for employees at 3,600 shell companies. A Texan man filed loan applications for 15 made-up firms and pocketed $24.8m in government support.As countries scale back unparalleled emergency-relief programmes there is growing interest in where the funds went. The estimates that since January 2020 governments have doled out $15.5trn in non-health-care spending and loans in response to the covid-19 pandemic. The rush to support households and firms led to poor procurement, messy programmes and inadequate oversight. The best estimates of fraud, so far, are from Britain and America; other countries, where wrong doing may well have been more prevalent, lack audits tracing where the money went. In America at least 4.5% of funding under the Act, the largest pandemic-stimulus bill, went to cheats. Applying that figure globally suggests that nearly $700bn could have ended up in the wrong hands.