The former Conservative peer Michelle Mone has admitted that she lied when she denied repeatedly having been involved with a company that made millions of pounds in profits from UK government PPE deals during the pandemic.
Mone said she “wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes” and had not told the truth about her involvement to protect her family from press attention. When it was put to her that she had admitted lying to the press, Mone replied: “That’s not a crime.”
Guardian investigations found Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, were involved with the company PPE Medpro, which was awarded contracts worth £203m in May and June 2020 after she approached ministers, including Michael Gove, with an offer to supply PPE.
The National Crime Agency is conducting an investigation into alleged criminal offences in the procurement of the contracts by the company.
Responding to Mone’s comments to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, the shadow health secretary, Wes Streeting, said: “Our message to those people who sought to use the pandemic to get rich quick [is]: we want our money back.”
Labour has also called on Gove to appear before MPs to face questions over the scandal.
In a film uploaded to YouTube last week, paid for by PPE Medpro, which featured the first public interviews with Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, since the NCA began its investigation, the film’s presenter, Mark Williams-Thomas, said the couple were facing criminal allegations of conspiracy to defraud, fraud by false representation and bribery. They both deny wrongdoing.
In the Kuenssberg interview, Mone, who was involved with the lingerie company Ultimo before David Cameron appointed her to the House of Lords in 2015, admitted that she and Barrowman, through their lawyers, repeatedly falsely denied they had any connection to PPE Medpro.
She said she regretted having done so: “We’ve done a lot of good, but if we were to say anything that we have done that we are sorry for, and that’s … We should have told the press straight up, straight away, nothing to hide … I was just protecting my family. And again, I’m sorry for that, but I wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes. No one.”
Kuenssberg said: “You’ve admitted today that you lied to the press and you essentially lied to the public.” Mone replied: “Saying to the press, ‘I’m not involved’, to protect my family, can I just make this clear, it’s not a crime … I was protecting my family.”
In November 2022, the Guardian revealed that leaked documents produced by HSBC bank indicated that Barrowman was an investor in PPE Medpro, and that he was paid at least £65m from its profits. The documents indicated that he then transferred £29m to an offshore trust, the Keristal Trust, of which Mone and her three adult children were beneficiaries.
In their BBC interview, Barrowman acknowledged publicly for the first time that the company had made a profit on that scale, and that he had transferred money to the Keristal Trust. “Medpro made a return on its investment of about, realistically, about 30% [approximately £61m],” he said.
The couple acknowledged that Barrowman had transferred money into the trust, and in the interview, Mone referred to the figure of £29m.
Barrowman said: “I’m an Isle of Man resident. The money comes to the Isle of Man because that’s fundamentally where I live. It goes on my tax return, and like all my sources of income that I’ve generated over many years. It goes into trust for the benefit of my family.”
Kuenssberg asked if any of the profits were used to buy a boat. Barrowman bought a yacht in May 2021, for £6m, which was renamed Lady M. In August 2021, Mone posted on Instagram a picture of herself and Barrowman on the yacht, with the words “Business isn’t easy. But it is rewarding.”
Barrowman said the PPE Medpro profits were not used to buy the yacht. Mone said: “It’s not my yacht. It’s not my money. I don’t have that money and my kids don’t have that money, and my children and family have gone through so much pain because of the media. They have not got £29m.”
Mone was pressed on why she did not mention PPE Medpro in her register of financial interests as a member of the House of Lords. She said the Cabinet Office had advised her that she did not need to. A government spokesperson said in response: “We do not comment on ongoing legal cases”.
Labour has sought to pile pressure on the government since the revelations. The shadow Cabinet Office minister, Nick Thomas-Symonds, called on Gove to face questions from MPs.
In a letter to the levelling up secretary, he wrote: “This series of events has led to civil litigation and a National Crime Agency investigation. Yet these ongoing matters should not preclude you from addressing questions about your own involvement and the role of the government.
“Events so far expose a shocking recklessness by the Conservative government with regard to public money, and a sorry tale of incompetence in relation to the so-called ‘VIP Lane’ for procurement during the pandemic.”
The Liberal Democrat Cabinet Office spokeswoman, Christine Jardine, said Mone’s admission was “jaw-dropping”.
In a statement, the NCA, which investigates serious and organised crime, said its investigation, opened in May 2021, was looking into “suspected criminal offences committed in the procurement of PPE contracts by PPE Medpro”.
The government is also suing for the return of the £122m it paid for protective surgical gowns, alleging that they were unsafe to use. PPE Medpro is defending the legal action. Speaking after Mone’s interview, Streeting said a Labour government would appoint a Covid corruption commissioner to recoup some of the £8bn lost to fraud during the pandemic.
“There’s a fundamental point of principle here, which is in the midst of a deadly pandemic, when so many people rushed to help others in all sorts of ways … there were others who saw the pandemic as an opportunity to make a quick buck at someone else’s expense,” he said.
