Uk, here are all the startups financed by the Tory government’s Future Fund
The point of Daniele Meloni
Last week Boris Johnson rattled off the Tory government spending figures to support businesses and workers during the pandemic: over £ 470 billion. The Treasury Ministry, the very powerful Her Majesty's Treasury, led by Chancellor Rishi Sunak, had to pay so much to mitigate the effects of the Covid crisis and prevent the country's economic collapse during lockdowns.
Among the measures taken by Sunak, one in particular came under the lens of financial market analysts and economists: the creation, with a ceiling of 1.1 billion pounds, of the Future Fund, a venture capital fund through which the government has allocated funding for the most innovative start-ups. 1,190 companies benefited from it, including those active in the pharmaceutical and ecological conversion sectors, one of the workhorses of Boris Johnson, his wife Carrie, and the heir to the throne, the Prince of Wales, Charles.
The Future Fund – active from May 2020 to June 2021 – worked as follows: companies that requested it could benefit from government loans for 3 years; they could take advantage of government debt-to-equity conversions once new investments arrived without complying with any due diligence to access them.
Thus, the government has supported Vaccitech, a start-up that has been involved in the development of AstraZeneca's vaccine, but has also invested in companies far removed from high-tech, green economy and gender equity. On the contrary. The fund, managed by the British Business Bank (BBB), actually paid out only one seventh of the innovative start-ups, but stood out for the heterogeneity of transfers. The British press immediately remarked that 87% of the CEOs of newly formed companies are male, but the controversy flared up when the Financial Times revealed the list of beneficiaries, jealously kept in Whitehall.
The City newspaper revealed the names of the companies involved last Saturday. Thus we find Onto, a company that deals with providing services for electric cars; Novoltea which mixes two passions of the English: tea and alcohol; The Yaar Bar, a chain of bars offering Nordic yogurt; Jazzed, which offers digital services for music lovers; Borrow a Boat, a start-up that offers a rental service for yacht and sailing lovers; Jigged, an app that combines supply and demand for workers in the giga economy. And so on. Many have pointed out that yoghurts and tea with gin and tonic are not exactly the emblem of the future. Others pointed out the difficulties on the part of the BBB in managing the entire portfolio with only 10 employees for the overseeing activity. In all this, it is always John Bull, the English Trousers, who pays. Who knows if perhaps even this will not question the goodness of the new tax-and-spend course of the Conservatives: the elections are approaching – 2024, but, perhaps, it may also be 2023 – and Johnson will have to be much more attentive to the finances of the state than he has proven to be so far if he wants to get a second personal mandate, the fifth in a row for his party.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/economia/uk-ecco-tutte-le-startup-finanziate-dal-future-fund-del-governo-tory/ on Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:16:22 +0000.