The founder of one of the country’s biggest pub chains says that emergency government assistance designed to help companies through the pandemic could turn “once-viable businesses into zombie basket cases”.
Hugh Osmond, a former chairman of Punch Taverns, said that tens of billions of pounds of emergency loans were “just digging businesses further into trouble”.
Writing in The Times he says that the chancellor’s loan schemes were “the morphine masking the pain of a life-threatening wound”, adding: “What the economy needs now is more equity investment. Equity, not debt, is the engine of recovery and growth.” Almost £60 billion has been lent via four taxpayer-backed lending schemes to businesses. While the government has said that companies will be given assistance to repay the loans,
