Lil Wayne, Chris Brown, Marshmello Allegedly Misused Pandemic Grants

Lil Wayne, Chris Brown and Marshmello are just some of the musicians who utilized for and obtained payouts as a part of the Shuttered Venue Operations Grant, a authorities program meant to assist unbiased venues and humanities teams struggling through the pandemic. However in accordance with a brand new report, they allegedly used the cash to as an alternative pay themselves or throw lavish events at the price of taxpayers.

In an in depth report from Enterprise Insider, the musicians who obtained the grants — additionally together with Alice in Chains, Shinedown, Rae Sremmerd and Steve Aoki — utilized for help after the grant was signed into legislation by Donald Trump in 2020. The artists had been eligible to obtain as much as $10 million to spend on “extraordinary and mandatory” bills earmarked for his or her loan-out corporations, and had been required to make a good-faith assertion to the Small Enterprise Administration and present their corporations had misplaced income of no less than 25 p.c between one quarter in 2019 and the identical quarter in 2020.

However the report claims that most of the musicians who obtained the grants, none of whom responded to the publication’s requests for feedback, used the cash to pay both themselves or for unrelated bills. Wayne, whose reps didn’t reply to Selection‘s request for remark, obtained $8.9 million that he divvied up for private use together with $1.3 million on personal jets, over $460,000 on designer garments and $2.14 million to settle a debt to his former supervisor Cortez Bryant.

Brown, in the meantime, obtained $10 million for his firm CBE Touring. The performer paid himself $5.1 million and spent practically $80,000 on his lavish thirty third celebration. Marshmello was given a $9.9 million grant, all of which went into his pocket since he made greater than $9.9 million from touring in 2019.

Aoki’s firm DJ Child Millionaire Touring used $2.4 million on payroll prices, $1.9 million of which was paid to Aoki. Three members of Shinedown break up $2.5 million of their $8.3 million grant, whereas its 15 touring workers obtained a mixed $650,000. Rae Sremmurd acquired $7.7 million for its Sremm Touring, with a stable chunk going to the duo.

In whole, 13,000 arts teams obtained cash from SVOG. At first, musicians weren’t explicitly eligible till the SBA reversed the choice in late 2021. In response to the SVOG web site, this system included over $16 billion in grants to shuttered venues.