Shamed former Health Secretary Matt Hancock failed to publicly declare meetings with testing firms that later secured millions of pounds worth of Covid contracts, the Mirror has learned.
It comes as Boris Johnson faces mounting pressure to sack Health Minister Lord Bethell, a close ally of Mr Hancock, after 27 of his meetings were left off official disclosures for more than a year.
Lord Bethell is under fire over claims he used a personal email account to discuss Covid contracts.
And questions remain over how he came to sponsor a Parliament security pass for Gina Coladangelo - Matt Hancock's mistress.
Today, emails obtained by the Good Law Project and seen by the Mirror suggest Mr Hancock attended two “missing” meetings - yet his name is absent from the official record.
Labour has called for Lord Bethell to be sacked, and for a full, independent inquiry to be launched into the private emails and undisclosed meetings.
The Department of Health admitted the meetings had not been properly declared, but said this was an “error” - and denied they had been deliberately withheld.
Deputy leader Angela Rayner said: “Throughout this pandemic Matt Hancock and Lord Bethell's first priority seems to have been enriching their mates, not protecting our NHS, keeping the public safe and saving lives.
“We can’t trust a word these Tories say, that’s why we need a fully independent investigation so the public know just how much of their money the Conservatives have funnelled to their cronies in secret.”
This week, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) admitted a week of Lord Bethell’s diary from April 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, was missing from published disclosures due to an “admin error.”
Nine of the meetings were with firms who later secured Covid contracts worth a combined £1 billion.
Asked this morning if all meetings had now been declared, the Prime Minister’s official spokesman said: "Obviously there are rules about declaring meetings and we expect all ministers to continue to abide by those."
And he said the Prime Minister had "full confidence" in Lord Bethell.
But the Mirror has learned Matt Hancock also joined a phone call with bosses of diagnostic firm Abingdon Health and a zoom call involving Excalibur Healthcare which led to hundreds of millions of pounds worth of government contracts being awarded.
The phone call with the Chairman and CEO of Abingdon Health was added to the official list on Tuesday, but doesn’t mention the former Health Secretary attended.
The firm later was later testing contracts worth up to £85 million without competition - over which the Good Law Project is pursuing legal action against DHSC.
An email shows Mr Hancock’s secretary showed the Health Secretary wanted to join the call with the firm’s top brass “for 5/10 minutes”.
There’s no suggestion of wrongdoing on the part of either firm.
In a previously disclosed email sent just days after the meeting, DHSC’s deputy director of research wrote to senior colleagues warning that Mr Hancock and Lord Bethell already seemed to have approved the deal.
"This all happened over the weekend without any engagement with us", he wrote, adding that it was "no way to do business".
The second meeting, with Excalibur Healthcare - an Isle of Man based firm which later secured a £135m contract to supply ventilators - is still entirely missing from the officially published list.
Representatives of Excalibur were invited to the zoom call in an “urgent” email on April 1 sent by Mr Hancock’s Private Secretary.
"Secretary of state has asked that you join an urgent call with him today to discuss strategy for how we best further leverage and rapidly scale up the UK's domestic diagnostic industry to support the work on testing for Covid-19," the email read.
It went on: "We're interested in exploring short and medium-term solutions - and the right incentives and support for our partners in industry to scale up at speed."
A DHSC spokesperson said: “It's deliberately misleading to imply these meetings have gone purposefully unrecorded for personal gain - ministers have no involvement in the awarding of these contracts.
"The department is committed to transparency and to publishing all relevant ministerial meetings and will ensure this error is corrected as soon as possible. ”
