The 1837 Act paid substantial amount of money constituting 40% of the Treasury’s tax receipts at the time to the former slave owners, but nothing to the liberated people.

[6] British historian Nicholas Draper, in his book The Price of Emancipation: Slave-Ownership, Compensation and British Society at the End of Slavery, states that "Nathan Rothschild and his brother-in-law Moses Montefiore led a syndicate underwriting the issue of three new series of securities to raise £15 million: we don’t know how much they distributed or sub-underwrote.

4. c. 73) contained provision for payments to slave owners in Cape of Good Hope, Mauritius, and the Virgin Islands as compensation for their loss of property in order to persuade them to allow the legislation to be passed.

[8][9] Chair of the CARICOM Reparations Commission, Sir Hilary Beckles, has pointed out that the taxes of many descendants of slaves in the UK have been used to repay the compensation loan, which he called "the greatest act of political immorality".

University College London set up a project called Legacies of British Slave-ownership which aims to list the individuals who received compensation.

Since 2018, numerous Freedom of Information Act requests have been sent to the British government and Bank of England for the names of those who were paid with the bonds, of which all were denied.