VB can pay her employees. That is the whole point. She is instead choosing to take money from a cash strapped struggling country simply because she can.
This, in spades.
Any talk of furlough funding only being available to profit-making businesses is daft. Ditto requiring shareholders/business owners to sell their personal assets before accessing grants: we have many years of case law supporting the concept of the veil of incorporation, and this isn’t the time to tear that up.
Nor can the Treasury put in schemes to support businesses at high speed and design complex conditions about who qualifies that only penalise rich greedy people, not ordinary honest entrepreneurs.
No, as others have said, this is about morals and consequences.
If you can easily afford to pay your staff during lockdown, why grab government grants just because you can?
I can see the argument for supporting Virgin, even though it sticks in my craw to help the business of a tax-avoiding self-publicist, because of the many thousands of employees affected and the fact that we as a country need aviation businesses. But handing cash to rich, spoiled hobby designers like VB and Stella McCartney, each with a handful of employees they could easily pay themselves by injecting a director’s loan or subscribing for extra equity? No.
As for ‘the Beckhams have paid loads of tax here’: you’re sure about that, are you? They were involved in a very dubious tax avoidance scheme called Icebreaker, and last year the scheme organisers and participants lost their appeal. All rich people. Greedy bastards.