VIP lanes
and 25m faulty gowns: what PPE Medpro trial reveals about Tory response to
Covid
Case
against Michelle Mone-linked company showed pressure to award contracts to
those with political connections
David
Conn
Wed 1 Oct
2025 10.45 BST
Opening
the high-stakes trial in a workaday, office-like courtroom in June, the
government’s barrister Paul Stanley KC sought to manage expectations for the
media crowd in the folding seats at the back.
The case,
he said, was not going to focus on the role of Michelle Mone, the Conservative
peer who helped secure multimillion pound personal protective equipment (PPE)
contracts for her husband’s company during the Covid pandemic.
Rather,
it was about the PPE itself, delivered on the second contract, in which the
government paid PPE Medpro £122m to supply sterile surgical gowns. Health
officials, it emerged in the trial, had rejected the gowns on sight in
September 2020 as not compliant with laws governing PPE safety, and they were
never used in the NHS. This trial was the DHSC’s claim for the company,
ultimately owned by Lady Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug
Barrowman, to repay the money.
During
the pandemic, Mone and Barrowman’s false public denials of their involvement,
the secret profits banked, and Mone’s Instagram pictures of herself on a
sun-kissed yacht named Lady M in the summer of 2021, made her the poster woman
for the Tory government’s “VIP lane” contracts, which enriched a few while the
nation suffered.
Some of
the evidence in the trial further illuminated Mone’s role, in pressing civil
servants for the gowns contract to be awarded to the company. But Stanley,
representing the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), said the court
was not going to consider “any of the ethical or political implications” of
Mone’s involvement.
“This
case is simply about whether 25 million surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro
were faulty,” Stanley told the judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill.
The press
area never lacked spare seats after that first morning, as the opposing teams
of lawyers pored over technical, regulatory and legal details through the
summer’s heatwave. But the core issues were still of huge public interest:
about how the safety of equipment required to protect lives in hospitals was
assured and how Boris Johnson’s government procured PPE when the pandemic
struck.
Court
documents did set out some of Mone’s role in that process, including that she
had made the first approach; as the Guardian revealed in March 2022, she
contacted former ministers Michael Gove and Lord Agnew, who referred her offer
to the VIP lane.
The “high
priority lane”, termed the VIP lane by civil servants, was set up as the
government was deluged with offers to fill the UK’s depleted PPE stockpile.
Approaches from politically connected people were treated as more credible, and
more demanding of a response, than others, even from experienced PPE suppliers.
Evidence
from a Cabinet Office civil servant, Richard James, showed that most
communication with PPE Medpro came from its then director, Anthony Page, who
also worked for Barrowman’s financial services firm in the Isle of Man, but
that “Mone remained active throughout”.
Correspondence
showed how insistently Page pushed for the contract, sometimes chasing more
than once on the same day, and the pressure Mone applied. As Stanley promised,
the lawyers did not pick over it, but her involvement and the VIP access she
was afforded shaped the context in which her husband’s company was given £122m
of government money to supply vital PPE.
As
officials considered details provided, James described Page to another civil
servant as “desperate” to close the deal. At one point, officials told Page
that a proposed Chinese factory was not technically approved, and Page reported
this “extremely disappointing situation” to Mone. Mone then had “various
communications” with Chris Hall, a senior official in the Cabinet Office,
Stanley’s submission said, “in which she pressed Medpro’s case”.
The
DHSC’s technical team approved the offer on 22 June 2020, and officials put
“VIP” in the email subject line, which read: “Urgent VIP TA [technical
assurance] Review … PPE Medpro Limited Gowns – ACCEPT.”
The
contract was signed four days later, the DHSC buying 25m sterile surgical gowns
for £4.88 each – £122m. The Guardian reported in March 2022 that the gowns
appeared to cost £46m to buy from the factory – an apparent profit of £76m for
PPE Medpro and three intermediary companies.
Stanley
maintained throughout that the DHSC’s case was straightforward: the gowns PPE
Medpro provided did not meet safety and sterility standards. The safety of
medical products is established by having the manufacturing process certified
by an authorised quality assurance organisation, termed a “notified body”,
which have numbers to identify them. Sterile surgical gowns – the sterility
necessary to prevent infection in operating theatres – must be labelled with a
CE mark, denoting compliance with European standards, and a number after it,
identifying the notified body which certified the manufacture. The only other
way for sterile gowns to be approved in the UK would be if the Medicines and
Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) agreed an alternative
manufacturing process, known as a derogation.
The PPE
Medpro gowns shipped from China bore a CE mark on their labelling but no
number. This meant the manufacture, and the sterility, were not certified by a
notified body. No derogation had been sought from the MHRA. Stanley’s case was
that the gowns “did not comply with the law” governing safety, so PPE Medpro
had not delivered sterile gowns as ordered and set out in the contract and must
repay the £122m, plus millions more in storage and other costs.
Charles
Samek KC, representing PPE Medpro, argued that the company had never promised
to supply gowns certified with a CE mark and notified body number. Page had
told civil servants in the pre-contract correspondence how the gowns would be
made in China, Samek said, and the DHSC had agreed the contract on that basis.
“They
were manufactured by a reputable and certified Chinese manufacturing concern,”
Samek argued in his opening submission, “and they were sterilised by equally
reputable and certified Chinese sterilising factories.” If a derogation was
needed, it was up to the DHSC to apply for it, Samek argued.
In
December 2020, as Mone and Barrowman through their lawyers publicly denied
involvement, PPE Medpro issued a rare press release, saying it was not awarded
contracts “because of company or personal connections to the UK government or
the Conservative party”. The statement said the company was “proud” that face
masks provided for the first, £80.85m contract, and the gowns, “undoubtedly
helped keep our NHS workers safe at a time of shortages due to the Covid
pandemic”.
That was
not true; the gowns had been stopped from being distributed and were never used
in the NHS. The case revealed more of that process after the gowns arrived at
NHS warehousing facilities in Daventry. Zarah Naeem, an MHRA safety official,
inspected them on 11 September 2020, and noted the CE mark with no notified
body number. In subsequent correspondence, Page told the MHRA that PPE Medpro
had never promised that the gowns would have “Notify [sic] Body
accreditations”. Alan Taylor, an MHRA investigator, told Page that the CE mark
should not have been on the label without a notified body having certified that
all requirements for sterility had been met.
“On this
basis I will advise that the stock at Daventry cannot be released to the NHS
until this matter is resolved satisfactorily and the product has the correct
notified body certification,” Taylor wrote.
The DHSC
issued a formal rejection notice on 23 December 2020, telling PPE Medpro that
the gowns were “non-compliant with the PPE laws”. Later it commissioned tests
which found a high proportion of the gowns were not sterile. In the trial,
Samek, on behalf of PPE Medpro, disputed the validity of those test results.
In
November 2022, the Guardian revealed that Barrowman had been paid at least £65m
from PPE Medpro’s profits, then transferred £29m to a trust set up to benefit
Mone and her children. The Conservative government, then led by Rishi Sunak,
did not sue for return of the £122m until after the public and parliamentary
outcry which followed the Guardian’s reporting.
During
the five-week trial, Mone never appeared, but Barrowman was in court most days,
sitting behind his company’s lawyers. Yet Samek called neither Barrowman nor
anybody else involved with PPE Medpro to give evidence and be questioned.
Stanley called eight witnesses for the DHSC, to testify about how the contract
was procured, and the gowns rejected.
Stanley
had in effect cautioned that the trial would concern unsensational detail, not
the stuff of political scandal. But the evidence nevertheless illuminated the
inside workings of the government’s pandemic response, a glimpse into civil
servants’ experiences of dealing with pressure for contracts from people given
VIP treatment due to Conservative connections.
Mone
posted from the Lady M in August 2021: “Living my best life!” In December 2022
she took a leave of absence from the Lords, which continues. She finally
admitted in a BBC interview in December 2023 that she had lied to the media
when she denied being involved in PPE Medpro, and Barrowman acknowledged the
money he had made. The National Crime Agency began an investigation in May 2021
into whether Mone and Barrowman had committed any criminal offences in the
procurement of the contracts, which the couple deny. The investigation, which
Samek said hung over PPE Medpro “like Damocles’ sword,” is ongoing.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário