By Asyia Iftikhar

Copyright metro

The public accounts are available up until 2022 (Picture: Gareth Cattermole/Getty Images)

Thomas Skinner has reportedly not paid back a £50,000 taxpayer loan provided during Covid in 2020, despite bragging about businesses’ success.

The Strictly Come Dancing star, 34, rose to fame after appearing in Lord Sugar’s BBC reality series The Apprentice in 2019 and has since become a controversial figure.

His entry into this year’s Strictly line-up has been met with uproar after he was seen spending time with US Vice President JD Vance in Cornwall as well as the married father-of-two admitting to an affair which has been slammed by the likes of Katherine Ryan.

Now, it has emerged that Skinner has allegedly not paid back a £50,000 business loan as part of the bounce back loan scheme the UK government rolled out at the start of the pandemic to help struggling businesses.

Records show that his business, the Fluffy Pillow Company – does not have appeared to have repaid the money. In the company filings between 2020 and 2021, we see the assets jump from £1,301 to £51, 301.

This remains the case until their latest statement publicly published in 2022.

The former Apprentice star launched the Fluffy Pillow Company (Picture: BBC)

Despite this, in his 2023 autobiography, Graft: How To Smash Life, the TV personality boasted about how lucrative business had been over the pandemic for both this business and Bosh Beds.

‘The company grew quickly after I finished The Apprentice and did very well thanks to massive demand during the pandemic when everyone had money to spare and plenty of time to spend in bed,’ he said.

In a post from December 2021, he had declared: ‘Today I’ve turnt (sic) over £1.8 million pound in 1 year with BOSH BEDS!’. He quit as the director of Bosh Beds in November 2022, although previously claiming he was getting ‘million-pound deals’.

Although things seem to have since taken a downward turn.

Companies House have since issued four separate notices to liquidate the firm due to lack of business activity. According to the loan terms, repayments should have started within 12 months.

He has spoken about the success of both his businesses and also the struggle (Picture: BBC)

Discussing the business’s failure on a podcast, he said: ‘Yes….I had been taking a lot of money. I was in a state,’ adding elsewhere: ‘I kept all the guys on and kept trying to keep everything going.’

Now selling mattresses from his van, in August he said in a deleted X post: ‘How do all these celebrities have loads of money? You don’t get bundles of dough for TV or adverts etc (well I don’t)….

‘But I look on Instagram and they’re always in this gaff or posting in a new motor.

‘I finished me Strictly stuff earlier today and I’m now out in me van delivering mattresses. Do I need to be part of a special club now on the tele that’s gives ya unlimited monies,’ per The Sun.

He is partnered with Amy Dowden in this year’s Strictly (Picture: :BBC/Ray Burmiston)

Skinner was recently accused of faking ‘death threats’ after deleting a screenshot of an alleged DM saying he was ‘kill him’.

The star has been vocal about his response to the ongoing uproar at his casting.

‘Certain people are doing everything they can to ruin me. Mainly Faceless accounts giving it large and abusing me, hypocrites making everything political.

‘Now I see people are fuming that I’m on Strictly…. and the funny thing is that the majority of them got “be kind” wrote in their bios. You couldn’t make it up,’ he wrote online.

Metro has reached out to Thomas Skinner’s representative for comment.

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