Troy and Jackie Galo - Central Exhibitions Ltd
Our setup.... Central Exhibitions Ltd was setup by my father alone about 12 years ago, I took over from him in 2015 so he could retire and my husband joined in 2019 as we had a daughter and felt it would give us more flexibility to look after her and run a good business.
We specialise in events and exhibitions. Even though we are a small local business in order to trade with some venues we use, we had to become a Ltd company so that’s how the business was setup. My husband and I are Directors of the company and take a small PAYE salary and the rest in dividends.
We assumed that we would be classed as self-employed as we are the business and it seems to be the case when we’ve applied for a mortgage. Sadly not, we are to be treated as employees of Central Exhibitions Ltd and cannot claim the self-employed benefits that others can.
We can be put on Furlough as employees but it would mean closing the company for an amount of time plus we’d only get a funding based on 80% of a small salary as we mainly pay ourselves in dividends like most other companies with this setup.
Closing the company isn’t practical as we are working hard to sell future exhibitions to generate an income for when we get out of this mess but we are not receiving an income at the moment because we’ve had to cancel all the events we had planned for late March, April, May and now quite likely June and possibly even July.
As a business we still have monthly overheads to cover and we don’t want to take out a loan that we can’t then pay back at a later date.
It seems as though we, along with many thousands of companies are falling into a gap where we don’t qualify for help despite being a well-established company with a history of filed tax returns.
Shouldn't small Ltd businesses be supported?
We’ve been sent a petition that is the closest fit to our situation, we have signed and please ask other people to sign this too, to try and get the Government to see that we are being forgotten and need their help like many others that haven't qualified for help either.
