Who Are the Biggest Corporations That Kept Their PPP Loans?
Remember how angry everybody got when Shake Shack and Ruth’s Chris Steak House were given tens of millions of dollars in PPP loans intended for small businesses, then had to give the money back? (Fun Fact: Nathan’s Famous Hot Dogs of Coney Island’s July 4th Hot Dog Eating Contest also gave back their $1.2 million PPP loan when people complained). But some huge corporations have quietly gotten away with keeping tens of millions of dollars in loans that were supposed to go to companies much smaller than them.
We reported last month that SF’s biggest landlord Veritas kept their $3.6 million loan. The Broke-Ass Stuart I-Team reviewed a ton of publicly available data on who received PPP loans. (Registration is required for that database, we signed up so you don’t have to.) This doesn’t cover all PPP loans, it’s just those companies that are publicly traded on a stock exchange, because they have certain public reporting requirements with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. And there are some household names and big rich companies who got loan money that they really ought to give back.
The people who make Nestea, a $140 million corporate conglomerate called New Age Beverages Corporation, got a $6.8 million PPP loan. The corporation that owns crappy burger chain Fuddruckers, a $53 million corporation called Luby’s, Inc., got a $10 million PPP loan that they did not give back. And RealPlayer, the early-2000s online video tool that does indeed still exist, kept their $2.8 million PPP loan even though their parent company RealNetworks is valued at $70 million.
There’s even a weed company that got a PPP loan! North Carolina-based cbdMD, who make “CBD bath bombs” and are valued by investors at a staggering $50 million, still got $1.5 million in PPP loans.
The worst gamers of the PPP system are companies you’ve never heard of. Something called Staffing 360 Solutions, who make $500 million a year, somehow got $19 million in PPP loans. Other $10 million loans went out to a video company called Quantum Corporation (valued at $143 million), Universal Stainless & Alloy Products ($69 million valuation), and Independence Contract Drilling ($23 million).
You can see the full list of publicly traded companies that got PPP loans at FactSquared.
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