Grant Bovey, the husband of Anthea Turner, the TV presenter, has helped land the taxpayer with a bill of more than £20m after the collapse of his buy-to-let property empire.

Lloyds Group, which is 43% owned by the taxpayer, has sustained losses of more than £50m from the collapse of Imagine Homes and other parts of Bovey’s buy-to-let group, because of debts inherited from HBOS, the failed bank it took over early this year. HBOS poured millions of pounds into Bovey’s business, even though the tycoon had little professional background in property and had already presided over a number of collapsed firms.

Despite the business failures, Bovey and Turner, who was a presenter on Blue Peter and GMTV, have remained in the public eye, reportedly earning about £100,000 for their recent appearance on Hell’s Kitchen, the reality TV show.

They have just bought two homes in Surrey, previously owned by Chris Evans, the radio presenter, for £5m.

HBOS’s financing of Bovey’s property empire was overseen by Peter Cummings, the man who spearheaded the bank’s aggressive corporate lending.

After Lloyds Banking Group took control of HBOS, it had to write off £7 billion worth of loans approved by Cummings’s department. He left the bank in January with a payoff of more than £600,000 and a pension worth £6m.

Shortly before the property market turned sour in 2007, HBOS had injected £20m into Imagine Homes.

Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said: “Yet again we find a tale of reckless lending by the banks where the taxpayer is left to pick up the tab. Buy-to-let was always one of the riskiest areas of the property market and HBOS should never have left itself so exposed.”

Set up by Bovey in 2003, Imagine Homes bought expensive apartments in London and Dubai, selling the majority to investors for whom it also found tenants. It then furnished the flats and guaranteed a 7.5% rental yield for each of the first two years.

Imagine Furnishings, Turner’s business, was responsible for decorating the flats.

With the onset of the credit crunch the value of the properties plummeted and Imagine Homes was unable to keep up with its loan payments.

Last October HBOS took control of the company and four weeks ago Lloyds Banking Group called in Deloitte to wind it up. Three other companies in the Imagine Group also went under late last year.

A source close to Lloyds said: “The loss to the bank alone is more than £50m. It will be made public by the administrators within the next few days.”

Bovey has previously said he has lost millions of pounds of his own money as a result of the collapse of Imagine.

It is understood the bank is now seeking to recoup some of its losses from Bovey, who together with his wife received more than £4m from their buy-to-let ventures.

Imagine Homes lost money in all of the four years for which accounts are filed at Companies House. There were losses of £6.4m and £2.8m in 2007 and 2006, after losses of £2.1m in the two previous years.

Yet the accounts show Bovey took loans of more than £1.4m from Imagine Homes during those four years and a further £900,000 from another one of his companies. All these interest-free loans were subsequently waived.

Meanwhile, Turner had received a loan of £573,738 in 2007 from Imagine Furnishings, which also slid into administration last year. She received consultancy fees of £674,410 during 2006 and 2007.

The Sunday Times approached Bovey on Thursday to ask him about the size of the losses to the bank and whether he was negotiating with the bank to pay back some of the debt. He is on a charity cycling trip and declined to comment, as did Lloyds Banking Group and Deloitte, the administrator of Imagine Homes.

Bovey has assured The Sunday Times that the payments he took were not illegal and that he had paid all the tax due on the waived loans. All payments to him and his wife ceased once the company slid into trouble, he said.

Bovey has already launched his next venture — it is called the Distressed Property Company.

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