Washington Post: Publicly traded firms paid dividends, bought their own stock after receiving PPP loans to pay employees

Some publicly traded companies that received taxpayer-backed small business loans to pay their employees during the early weeks of the pandemic paid out millions to Wall Street investors in dividends and share buybacks, publicly available financial disclosures reviewed by The Washington Post show.

“The Trump administration wrote the PPP rules and sent billions of dollars to the well-resourced and well-connected rather than actual small businesses struggling during this public health and economic crisis,” said Kyle Herrig, president of an advocacy group called Accountable.US.

“The fact that there was little transparency or accountability under this program amounted to an invitation for large companies to misuse tax dollars to their benefit.”