A company linked to peer Baroness Michelle Mone has lost a High Court battle with the government over a £122 million pandemic deal for PPE gowns which turned out to be faulty .
PPE Medpro agreed to supply 25 million surgical gowns to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) in the early stages of the pandemic, in a deal struck through the controversial VIP lane for Covid contracts.
But the products that were supplied turned out to not be sterile and were deemed unfit for use.
The government sued in a bid to recover the costs of the £122 million contract as well as £8 million in storage costs, while Medpro opted to fight the case.
And in a judgment delivered on Wednesday, Mrs Justice Cockerill ordered Medpro to pay back the full £122m cost of the gowns contract, finding the company liable for three breaches of contract.
She found the gowns supplied by Medpro were faulty and not sterile, and the NHS had “no need” for the product.
The judge rejected the government’s claim for storage costs.
In a summary of the ruling, the judge said the government is “entitled to the price of the gowns as damages”.
“This was because the gowns could not be used as sterile gowns, the alternative was to use them as non-sterile gowns, however the NHS had no need for such gowns and the evidence showed no reasonable market for the gowns outside the NHS due to regulatory and procurement constraints”.
Mr Barrowman reacted instantly to the judgment by labelling it a “travesty of justice”.
Ahead of the ruling, PPE Medpro filed a “notice of appointment to appoint an administrator”, in a move that could thwart the government’s retrieval of money.
And Lady Mone herself launched an astonishing attack on Ministers on social media, suggesting that she and her husband had been made the “poster couple for the PPE scandal” to distract from wider anger at the VIP contracts lane set up by Boris Johnson’s government at the start of the Covid pandemic.
“For the past seven months, I have stayed silent. But the truth is, I have endured five years of pure torture, relentless press and media attacks, every single day, without responding”, she wrote.
“Enough is enough. It is time for the public to know the truth.”
Lady Mone and her husband previously issued firm denials that they were linked to Medpro, and engaged lawyers to issue legal threats against those who suggested that was untrue.
Eventually, they were forced to admit that Mr Barrowman is heavily involved in the managing consortium, while he and his wife benefitted to the tune of £60 million from the PPE deal.
The National Crime Agency launched a criminal investigation into the MedPro deal in 2021, and last year it was revealed that assets worth a reported £75 million – including a Belgravia townhouse, an estate on the Isle of Man, and 15 bank accounts – have been frozen by investigators.
In the ruling, Mrs Justice Cockerill also rejected Medpro’s counter claim that the government had neglected its contractual duties during the deal, saying it “fails on multiple levels”.
She said Medpro’s argument that it relied on the DHSC for advice was “utterly unrealistic”.
“Medpro was presenting itself to DHSC as a worthy entrant into the fast lane for approval as a supplier and aiming to land contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds of public money.
“It said repeatedly that it had experience. It claimed to be well established: Mr Barrowman’s years of experience were trumpeted, as was its track record ‘manufacturing large quantities for the Australian government’.”
In her social media outburst, Lady Mone complained about editing in TV documentaries on the scandal, and suggested that the government has chosen to go after Medpro in court to distract from failings within the DHSC.
“This case was never about gowns or money”, she wrote. “It has always been about politics and blame-shifting, a way to cover up the Government’s disastrous £10 billion PPE write-off.
“Doug and I have been deliberately scapegoated and vilified in an orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement. “The Government decided to make us the poster couple for the PPE scandal, a convenient distraction to take the blame off them.
“Meanwhile, the public can see with their own eyes images of PPE worth billions dumped in fields and warehouses across the country. That is the real scandal.”
Lady Mone may also have landed herself in trouble with the High Court, after she posted images of letters sent to the government during the legal dispute and claimed that Medpro had tried, unsuccessfully, to settle the case on a “no fault” basis with a multimillion payment.
In court documents from May this year, the DHSC said the gowns were delivered to the UK in 72 lots between August and October 2020, with £121,999,219.20 paid to PPE Medpro between July and August that year.
The department rejected the gowns in December 2020 and told the company it would have to repay the money, but this has not happened, and the gowns remain in storage, unable to be used.
During the trial, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said 99.9999% of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract, equating to one in a million being unusable.
The DHSC claims the contract also specified PPE Medpro had to sterilise the gowns using a “validated process”, attested by CE marking, which indicates a product has met certain medical standards.
Mr Stanley said “none of those things happened”, with no validated sterilisation process being followed, and the gowns supplied with invalid CE marking.
He also said that 140 gowns were later tested for sterility, with 103 failing.
Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, said at the close of the trial that the Government had ordered 10 years’ worth of excess gowns by December 2020 and that it was suffering from “buyer’s remorse”.
He said the DHSC approved the gowns without seeing a valid CE mark and that PPE Medpro “did not pretend” to have one because it did not need it.
After delivery, the gowns were kept in shipping containers for “at least three months”, he added, and that contamination likely occurred “most probably during the subsequent transportation, storage and handling of the tested gowns”.
In a statement issued after the ruling, Mr Barrowman attacked the judge’s ruling as a “whitewash” and claimed it was an “establishment win on a case that was too big for the Government to lose”.
“Today, a travesty of justice took place following the judgement of Lady Justice Cockerill”, his spokesperson wrote, in a pre-prepared statement.
“She gave the DHSC an Establishment win despite the mountain of evidence in court against such a judgement.
“Her judgement bears little resemblance to what actually took place during the month long trial, where PPE Medpro convincingly demonstrated that its gowns were sterile.
“This judgement is a whitewash of the facts and shows that justice was being seen to be done, where the outcome was always certain for the DHSC and the government. This case was simply too big for the government to lose.”
The judge ordered that the government is refunded the contract cost by October 15.
Lady Mone was appointed to the Lords by David Cameron in 2015 but has been on a leave of absence from the House since December 2022.
In December 2023, it was reported that she was no longer a member of the Conservative Party.
