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The yacht, the wedding and £29m: Michelle Mone’s
life during the Covid crisis
After recommending PPE Medpro for £203m government
contracts, the Tory peer spoke of how business was hard but ‘rewarding’
David Conn
Wed 23 Nov
2022 18.08 GMT
In the
summer of 2021, when a traumatised Britain was enduring a third wave of Covid
infections as it struggled to emerge from the pandemic, the Conservative peer
Michelle Mone posted a photograph on Instagram of herself and her husband,
Douglas Barrowman, in the Mediterranean. They were on their new luxury yacht,
Lady M.
Mone, 51,
who attained celebrity status through her bra and lingerie company, Ultimo, and
was appointed to the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2015, told her
followers: “Today I’m feeling reflective. I feel so grateful to be where I am,
in a beautiful part of the world with the people I love the most. It wasn’t
easy. There were some real challenges, both emotionally and physically.
“Business
isn’t easy. But it is rewarding.”
The social
media update about the sun-soaked luxury that “Lady (Michelle) Mone OBE”, as
she describes herself on her social feeds, was enjoying on deck prompted an
obvious question: during a global health and economic crisis, what business had
she and Barrowman found that was so rewarding?
There had
been speculation some months earlier that the couple’s good fortune may have
had some connection to two large PPE contracts that the government awarded to a
newly formed company, PPE Medpro, during Covid’s first deadly wave. The
contracts were awarded via the “VIP lane” for companies recommended by
Conservative MPs and peers and other politically connected people, but the
government did not disclose at that time that PPE Medpro’s “VIP” had been Mone.
On paper,
PPE Medpro had apparent links with Mone: the company’s directors, Anthony Page
and Voirrey Coole, worked for Barrowman’s Isle of Man Knox Group, and Page had
been the registered secretary of Mone’s company MGM Media, which managed her
brand.
Asked in
late autumn 2020, after these contracts had been awarded, if they were involved
with PPE Medpro, Mone and Barrowman had emphatically denied having anything to
do with it.
To
emphasise the point, Page also issued a press release stating: “PPE Medpro was
not awarded the contract due to company or personal connections to the
government or Conservative party.”
Through the
two years of scrutiny that have followed, the manner of Mone and Barrowman’s
responses, almost all issued by lawyers acting on their behalf, has been
striking: a series of fierce denials of “involvement” in the company, or the
process through which it secured its government contracts, coupled with legal
threats.
However the
Guardian has chipped away at the edifice of the denials. A two-year
investigation establishing the couple’s links to PPE Medpro culminates today
with newly leaked documents indicating that Mone and Barrowman secretly
received tens of millions of pounds originating from the company’s profits,
which were sent to the Isle of Man.
The
documents state that Barrowman received at least £65m in PPE Medpro profits,
and transferred £29m to an offshore trust that, bank records indicate,
benefited his wife and her adult children.
Contacted
about the new disclosures, a lawyer for Mone said: “There are a number of
reasons why our client cannot comment on these issues and she is under no duty
to do so.” A lawyer who represents both Barrowman and PPE Medpro said that an
ongoing investigation limited what they were able to say on these matters. He
added: “For the time being we are also instructed to say that there is much
inaccuracy in the portrayal of the alleged ‘facts’ and a number of them are
completely wrong.”
A
high-profile wedding and an ugly spat
In the
autumn of 2020, months after PPE Medpro had secured the £203m Covid contracts,
Mone was tussling with other considerations, including how to hold a wedding in
the pandemic. In September 2020 she was forced to cancel a planned ceremony in
the 13th-century chapel of St Mary Undercroft, in the Palace of Westminster.
Instead,
she switched to the the Isle of Man, where there were few Covid restrictions at
the time. Barrowman, her then fiance, has a sprawling U-shaped nine-bedroom
home on the island. While the couple were making wedding arrangements from this
base, Barrowman seems to have also been focusing on moving profits gained from
PPE Medpro around various Isle of Man registered trusts, companies and
accounts.
None of
this was known then, despite the attention on Mone. Particularly since
receiving a peerage in 2015, Mone had become a fixture in the tabloids, which
titled her “Baroness Bra”. The wedding in November 2020 provided a level of
glamour that was gleefully splashed across pages of papers mostly still
concerned with the pandemic. Hello! magazine filled its pages with pictures of
the couple’s celebrations, including shots of the bride in her designer wedding
dress and Jimmy Choo heels.
After the
wedding, Mone took to Instagram to thank “everyone on the Isle of Man for
making our day so special”, including an opera singer and five live bands that
had played during the weekend.
In December
2020, with the UK still in tier 2 and 3 Covid restrictions, Mone received a
mixed public reaction to idyllic photos she posted online of the honeymoon at a
five-star resort in the Maldives where, she tweeted, the couple were having
“the most fantastic time”.
Just a
month later, the Guardian understands, the bank Barrowman used in the Isle of
Man, HSBC, was conducting an investigation into the financier’s receipt and
distribution of the millions from PPE Medpro’s profits, and – the Guardian
understands – decided to drop the couple as customers. HSBC declined to
comment.
Publicly,
however, all was blissful through the summer of 2021. Mone posted a series of
perfectly posed pictures, including ones on the deck of the Lady M, with
reflections on her state of contentment. “Decide what makes you happy and just
go for it,” she wrote on one.
In June
2021, Mone and Barrowman garnered widespread publicity for a newly announced
£18m business venture in Aberdeen, neospace, which provided office space
tailored for post-Covid hybrid working. In August, almost a year after the
couple are now known to have received a fortune in PPE Medpro profits, the
Scottish Sun reported that Mone’s adult children had altogether spent more than
£3m buying new properties in Glasgow.
Just weeks
after her 50th birthday, however, the cracks started to appear in Mone and
Barrowman’s carefully cultivated public image.
An ugly
spat a couple of years previously with a former friend of Indian heritage was
revealed by the Guardian. Mone was accused of sending him an allegedly racist
message, calling him “a waste of a man’s white skin”, after a yacht crash off
Monaco. Mone was interviewed under caution earlier this year, although in
August the Metropolitan police confirmed that no further action would be taken.
The mystery
around PPE Medpro was about to be broken too. For nearly 18 months the couple
had constantly dismissed, denied or played down any links to the company.
However the
Good Law Project, a not-for-profit campaign group, pursued a freedom of
information request that led to the information commissioner ordering the
government to publish the names of both the companies that had received
contracts through the VIP lane and those who had referred them. When it did so,
PPE Medpro was on the list, with the name of the VIP who initially referred the
company to the government: “Baroness Mone”.
Confronted
in November 2021 with the one inescapable fact at that time – that she had
recommended the company to her fellow Tory peer Theodore Agnew, then a minister
responsible for procurement – Mone’s lawyer said: “Having taken the very
simple, solitary and brief step of referring PPE Medpro as a potential supplier
to the office of Lord Agnew, our client did not do anything further in respect
of PPE Medpro.”
The lawyer
also stated that Mone had not declared the company on her Lords register of
interests because “she did not benefit financially and was not connected to PPE
Medpro in any capacity”.
The details
of how Mone and Barrowman were linked to the company came instead from key
information and documents provided by sources to the Guardian after Mone’s
referral of the company became public.
In early
January 2022, the Guardian revealed further details about Mone’s links to the
PPE Medpro contracts. Leaked files appeared to show that, despite their
constant denials, Mone and Barrowman did appear to have been secretly involved
in the company. By then it had also emerged that the gowns supplied under a
£122m contract had been rejected after a technical inspection and never used.
A day after
the Guardian’s report, seemingly unconcerned by the revelations, Mone told her
Twitter followers that she loved putting on make-up even when she had no event
to attend. But it was the last time she shared her thoughts with her followers.
On Instagram, too, her feed soon went quiet.
Then, in
March 2022, the Guardian revealed new details of how Mone’s efforts had helped
PPE Medpro secure its place in the VIP lane back in May 2020.
Her first
approach to the government was to her fellow Conservative Michael Gove, who was
then a Cabinet Office minister. Neither party has responded to questions about
the nature of their relationship and how Gove came to be Mone’s first point of
contact when offering to supply PPE to the government. She did tweet
approvingly about him in 2017, writing: “Brilliant night with my colleagues at
@UKHouseofLords Spent some time with @michaelgove I can honestly say,he’s mega
switched on&a nice guy.”
After her
approach to Gove in the weeks after the UK’s first lockdown, Mone contacted
Agnew by private email on 8 May 2020, copying in Gove. She offered to supply
large quantities of PPE face masks, the Guardian revealed, saying they could be
sourced through “my team in Hong Kong”.
Agnew
passed the offer to civil servants handling “priority” offers from politically
connected people. PPE Medpro, the company, was not even incorporated until four
days later, on 12 May 2020, but by the end of June, the government had
contracted to pay it £203m of public money.
A few weeks
after these latest revelations, in late April 2022, Mone made a rare appearance
in the House of Lords to vote on the government’s police, crime, sentencing and
courts bill. The following day police cars turned up at her London and Isle of
Man properties. The raids by the National Crime Agency (NCA), investigating
potential fraud relating to PPE Medpro, were reported widely. Mone has not
voted in the Lords since.
The latest
batch of documents reviewed by the Guardian state that in October 2020,
Barrowman transferred £29m originating from PPE Medpro profits to a trust set
up on the Isle of Man. Records indicate the trust was set up to benefit Mone
and her three children, and that its bank account was opened the same month
that she recommended PPE Medpro to Tory ministers.
Barrowman
is understood to have told HSBC that his wife had “no involvement” in the
business activities of PPE Medpro, and the onward transfer of its profits via
his personal bank account had been made “in his personal capacity”.
These
details will add significant pressure on the peer, who is facing an investigation
by the Lords commissioner for standards into whether she breached the conduct
rules by failing to register an interest in the company, and by lobbying for it
to be awarded government contracts. That investigation continues. Mone has
denied wrongdoing.
The NCA’s
investigation into potential fraud by PPE Medpro also continues. So far no one
has been arrested or charged. Lawyers for PPE Medpro have declined to comment.
Barrowman
declined to answer questions about whether money originating from PPE Medpro
profits was used to pay for the Lady M yacht, the new Glasgow properties, the
wedding or the honeymoon. A lawyer for Mone and her children said: “We are
advised there is no truth in what appears to be entirely speculative ‘guesses’
on your part.”
A year ago
Mone’s lawyer responded to a question about whether money derived from PPE
Medpro’s deal had funded the yacht. “The inference which you clearly wish to
create is that our client has used her position to lobby the government to
award lucrative contracts to companies ‘connected’ to her and then spent the
proceeds on an expensive yacht … That is not only wholly untrue, but if
repeated, is highly actionable as it is grossly defamatory of our client.”
Meanwhile,
the UK government is continuing its attempt to recover money from PPE Medpro in
relation to the unused gowns through a dispute resolution process. PPE Medpro
insists the gowns purchased through the £122m contract passed inspection, and
that the company – and, presumably, the beneficiaries of its profits – are
entitled to keep the money.
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