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Daily Mirror
Daily Mirror
Politics
Mikey Smith

Time running out for ministers to come clean on £600m Covid contracts meeting

Time is running out for Ministers to come clean over meetings that led to £600m worth of covid contracts being handed to a Tory-linked firm.

Labour accused the government of “chaos and incompetence” after waiting since November for the Government to publish the papers.

Health Secretary Sajid Javid has until Monday to publish minutes and notes from a meeting between Health Minister Lord Bethell and testing firm Randox.

At the time, ministers said they had been “unable to locate” the notes from the meeting.

Randox, which has donated £160,000 to the Conservative Party - as well as paying disgraced former MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year for advice - secured government testing deals at the height of the pandemic.

Meanwhile, it emerged ex-health minister Lord Bethell had to call in experts from Facebook to help him try to find WhatsApp messages linked to lucrative contracts.

Randox has donated £160,000 to the Conservative Party (PA)

The government told a High Court judge in August the texts had been lost because Lord Bethell "replaced" his phone.

But official records released this week show Lord Bethell met with a representative of Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, to discuss "message retention" the following month.

In November, the Commons passed a motion ordering the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) to publish details of the meeting.

Mr Javid confirmed work was "underway" to "gather, review and prepare" details of the meeting - and set a deadline of Monday for publication.

Labour chair Anneliese Dodds “It’s been months since the Government promised to publish the minutes of the infamous closed-doors meeting between Randox, Owen Paterson and Lord Bethell over the award of a hundred-million pound Covid contract.

“This should have been straightforward, but instead the government is on course to break another promise and draw more questions about their lack of transparency.

“It’s another example of the chaos and incompetence that is paralysing this Conservative Government while millions of families face a cost-of-living crisis.”

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