Taxpayers lose £400m from investment fund set up by Rishi Sunak

Taxpayers have lost £400m after the collapse of hundreds of startups backed by a heavily criticised Covid-era investment fund launched by Rishi Sunak when he was chancellor.

- Kalyeena Makortoff

The Future Fund spent £1.14bn backing 1,190 companies, some of them of types not usually associated with government portfolios such as a sex party organiser called Killing Kittens and the now defunct festival tickets business Pollen. The fund also invested nearly £2m in firms linked to Sunak's wife, Akshata Murty.

The Department for Business and Trade's latest annual report shows that 334 companies backed by the Future Fund have since gone under, costing the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds.