A company linked to the former Conservative peer Michelle Mone has failed to pay the government any of the £122m ordered by a high court judgment for supplying unusable personal protective equipment during the Covid pandemic.
Mrs Justice Cockerill ruled that PPE Medpro must, by a deadline of 4pm on 15 October, return the money it was paid by the Department of Health and Social Care for 25m sterile surgical gowns under a contract awarded in June 2020.
Reacting just before 5pm, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said PPE Medpro had failed to meet the deadline and the government would pursue the company for payment. The DHSC said that interest, which has been running on the £122m from when the PPE gowns were rejected as unusable in late 2020, was now £23.7m – making the total owed almost £146m.
“At a time of national crisis, PPE Medpro sold the previous government substandard kit and pocketed taxpayers’ hard-earned cash,” said Streeting. “PPE Medpro has failed to meet the deadline to pay – they still owe us over £145m, with interest now accruing daily.
“We will pursue PPE Medpro with everything we’ve got to get these funds back where they belong – in our NHS.”
Interest would now accumulate at an annual rate of 8%, the DHSC said.
Questions remain over how the government can get its money back, as the company, owned by Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, was left with little money, and was put into administration on 30 September, the day before the judgment was handed down.
A spokesperson for Barrowman and Mone has said that the “consortium partners of PPE Medpro”, a reference to three intermediary companies involved in the supply of gowns, were “prepared to enter into a dialogue with the administrators of the company to discuss a possible settlement with the government”.
Labour appeared not to have engaged with this suggestion of a discussion about a settlement, and was waiting for full payment to be made by the deadline.
The DHSC awarded the £122m gowns contract to PPE Medpro, and another worth £80.85m for face masks – a total of £203m – after Mone first approached the then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove in May 2020. The contracts were processed via the “VIP lane”, operated by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government during the pandemic, which gave high priority to people with political connections. Mone was appointed to the House of Lords by David Cameron in 2015.
She and Barrowman denied through their lawyers for years that they were involved in PPE Medpro. 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 three adult children.
In December 2023 Mone admitted in a BBC interview that the couple had lied, and they confirmed their involvement in the company. Barrowman acknowledged that he had been paid more than £60m and transferred money into the trust; the couple said that his children were beneficiaries as well.
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