Man gets home detention for falsely claiming Covid relief money - twice

An Auckland man has been sentenced to 6-months of home detention after falsely claiming Covid-relief money. Photo / 123RF

An Auckland man has been sentenced to six months home detention after stealing over $20,000 in Covid relief money.

Vaibhav Kaushik was sentenced in the Auckland District Court on February 13 for using a document to claim a pecuniary advantage.

The advantage came in the form of a Small Business Cashflow Loan (SBCS), which the former Labour Government announced in April 2020 to support small businesses adversely affected by the Covid-19 pandemic.

The loan had several key criteria Kaushik was able to subvert, twice, including that the “business” had to be viable and ongoing, and that the loan had to be used for the “business” and not given to shareholders or owners for personal use.

Kaushik applied for the loan in July 2020 under another person’s name, and the loan was subsequently paid into a bank account with that person as the account holder.

However, immigration records showed the person named by Kaushik had left New Zealand in 2013 and not returned.

Upon investigation, Inland Revenue found Kaushik had set up the other person’s myIR account, filed an income tax return under the person’s name and then made the loan application.

Further enquiries established the IP address used to file the income tax return and loan application online was linked to Kaushik’s home.

Kaushik repeated the process with another man’s name to apply for a second loan. That person left the country in 2017 and had not returned.

Both cases involved an associate of Kaushik’s, who resided in India.

Across the two loans, Kaushik benefitted financially from $23,600, which he used for personal items and gambling.

Kaushik’s defence lawyer applied for a discharge without conviction, however, the sentencing judge declined on the basis that Kaushik’s offending had many elements of greed to it.

Kaushik was given the maximum allowed sentence of six months community detention, with the judge ordering reparation to be paid in full by April 1.

Tom Raynel is a multimedia business journalist for the Herald, covering small business and retail.