Under the scheme to boost the struggling hospitality industry, which ran Mondays to Wednesdays from August 3–31, diners got up to half of their meal free up to £10 per customer if they ate at participating restaurants. This included 49 orders in just one minute on the stroke of midnight in a store not large enough for ten people to stand in, let alone sit.
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All but five of them were for exactly £20.99. In one week in his tiny Tunbridge Wells takeaway store – where there are no tables – 368 orders for the eat in offer were processed.The chef at one branch told how after arriving for one shift he was told to put 25 meals through as Eat Out to Help Out in one go, even though there were no customers in the store at the time.Most of his stores taking part in Eat Out to Help Out allowed only one customer in at a time to place an order and required them to wait outside until collections were ready, making eating in impossible.Mr Choudhary, who lives in a £1.6million house and drives a Lamborghini, is a poster boy for Papa John's and is used as case study to encourage new recruits.Whistleblowers say this continued through most of his empire, meaning the total falsely claimed would be more than £250,000. The same branches, which did not allow dining it, recorded more than 1,700 Eat Out to Help Out orders, despite the documents showing that not a single customer was recorded as having 'dined in' during this period. Sales reports seen by the Mail suggest the number of voucher payments in five of his branches alone went from almost zero in the two months before the scheme to more than £23,000 while it was under way. Workers who raised objections were threatened with the sack or reduced hours if they spoke out.īecause there was no revenue from the fake meals, staff were told to record the 'payments' as vouchers. Whistleblowers say he was was driven by 'greed' as his franchises had already seen a surge in business during the first virus wave as more people ordered takeaways. Mr Choudhary promised his managers bonuses for putting in large numbers of the fake orders. Last night, fraud experts warned the suspected scam was the 'tip of the iceberg', and highlighted how easily Government coronavirus schemes could be exploited, costing taxpayers billions of pounds. Raheel Choudhary, pictured with his Lamborghini, is the UK's biggest franchisee of Papa John's restaurants - but he is suspected of pocketing £250,000 of taxpayers' money