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The National Crime Agency has been handed a “vast” dossier of evidence on Baroness Mone, including texts and emails with senior officials and three ministers, The Times has learnt.
A war of words erupted this week as the Conservative peer laid into ministers and officials as part of her “fightback” against claims she lied to win £202 million of mask and gown contracts during the Covid pandemic for her husband’s firm, PPE Medpro.
The gowns were never used by the NHS, following a quality inspection, and the government is now fighting in the civil courts to recoup £122 million. PPE Medro says it will defend the claim.
But it is Mone’s claim that “everyone in government knew of my involvement” that has been put under the microscope this week. In her own words the Cabinet Office had asked her: “We just need you to put it in writing and declare your interest with us, that’s all,” she said in her interview with the BBC on Sunday.
Whether she did or not is yet to be determined and sits at the heart of the NCA fraud and bribery investigation, which was launched in May 2021.
The prime minister this week said that he is taking the scandal “incredibly seriously”.
Lord Bethell, a pandemic health minister, was the first former minister to lay into his colleague in the upper house, posting a text message in which Mone referred to PPE Medpro as “they”.
“Michelle Mone wasn’t honest about her financial interest to me,” he said. “She didn’t explain ‘from the very beginning’ about her financial ‘involvement’. It wasn’t in her [House of Lords] Register of Interests, as you’d expect. Rishi Sunak is right to take this very seriously.”
The Times has spoken to three more senior sources in the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), and the Cabinet Office, who each received messages from Mone, or had sight of her communications, who agree.
“Bethell is right about the House of Lords Register of Interests,” a senior Cabinet Office official said. “Never a peep and then Mone pocketed £60 million profit for her family. Now she’s feeling sorry for herself? You couldn’t make it up. I think she’s despicable.”
A second source, in the DHSC, said: “It is categorically false that she declared everything to the department. I’ve gone back and looked through paperwork.”
Doug Barrowman and Baroness Mone told Laura Kuenssberg that they were being vilified
PA
Mone, 52, says they are mistaken, telling a friend this week that she did tell Cabinet Office officials that her husband was financing the PPE deal.
“I can’t see what we’ve done wrong,” Mone said in her interview with Laura Kuenssberg last week. “The hatred, we’ve been absolutely vilified.”
She admitted, however, to lying to journalists by denying that her family would stand to benefit from the contract but said “that’s not a crime”. She also admitted that her husband, Doug Barrowman, placed half of the profit from the deal in an Isle of Man trust, in which Mone and her children are beneficiaries.
Mone said the civil service should have blocked the contract if they knew there was a conflict of interest. This is fair criticism, government insiders said, as long as Mone was honest in her dealings.
“We all know what it is to lie to attempt to secure a government contract… fraud,” a source said.
Mone declined to hand over emails or messages to The Times proving she said that she was representing Barrowman’s firm, citing the ongoing criminal investigation.
The NCA is considering allegations of conspiracy to defraud, fraud by false representation, and bribery, which Mone and Barrowman, 58, “categorically deny”. Officers raided six addresses, including their Belgravia residence, last year. The complex investigation is now well advanced and will conclude next year, an agency source said.
The intense acrimony towards Mone from within the Conservative Party was evident this week when Michael Gove, now the levelling up secretary, took the highly unusual step of calling for charges. “I hope that [NCA] inquiry results in a case being brought as quickly as possible,” he said.
It was a phone call between Mone and Gove on May 7, 2020 that started the whole affair. “I just said to him… ‘We can help, and we want to help’,” Mone recalled. Gove, then in charge at the Cabinet Office, was said to reply: “Oh my goodness, this is amazing.”
Michelle Mone’s yacht was renamed by Led by Donkeys activists
LED BY DONKEYS
The following day Mone sent an email to the private addresses of Gove and Lord Agnew, his deputy, who was in charge of procurement. “We have managed to source PPE masks through my team in Hong Kong,” she said. “In order to commit to this 100,000 [masks] per day could you please get back to me ASAP as freight will also need to be secured.”
At this stage, it is claimed, she did not declare an interest in PPE Medpro, despite using the phrase “my team”.
PPE Medpro was added to the VIP channel, a high priority lane containing offers referred by officials and politicians. Five days after the initial contact, on May 12, Barrowman registered PPE Medpro Limited with Companies House.
Much of the work then passed to civil servants in the PPE procurement “cell”. This consisted of the “buy team”, the “technical assurances team”, made up of experts who checked the delivery would meet necessary standards, the “closing team”, and the “deals committee”, which checked the contract over before it went to a senior official for final approval.
When progress was slow Mone was said to have pressed Agnew via email and telephone to “accelerate” the process. “She was rude, abrasive and bullying,” a source familiar with the VIP channel told the Sunday Times last year. “Her hectoring tone was very irritating”.
The deal to supply 25 million gowns at £4.88 each was signed on June 26 by Edward James, the deputy director of the DHSC, who was later awarded an MBE for services to healthcare. The “accounting officer” with ultimate responsibility for the contract was Sir Chris Wormald, the permanent secretary, The Times understands.
However, health inspectors later said the gowns were wrongly labelled as sterile, and were not wrapped correctly. The taxpayer is still paying for the unusable gowns to be stored “as evidence”, and the DHSC’s £134 million claim for “breach of contract and unjust enrichment” is in front of the High Court.
The details of the heavily-disputed case raise serious questions for senior civil servants about the haphazard “panic buying” of PPE in the early months of the pandemic.
High Court documents reveal that PPE Medpro delivered the gowns in 72 lots to the DHSC’s logistic partner, Uniserve, in China from July 12.
PPE Medpro claims Uniserve should have raised concerns at the factory gate if the gowns were faulty.
The gowns were then taken to a warehouse in Daventry, Northamptonshire, where they arrived in batches from August 20. It took two weeks, until September 2, for a DHSC inspector to look at the gowns. This was after the last of the £122 million payment arrived in PPE Medpro’s bank account on August 28. If the gowns were faulty, Mone asked last week, why did the government pay for them?
The company also claims they told civil servants how they would sterilise the gowns using radiation, receiving an email on June 12, seen by The Times, from a civil servant, which read: “Gowns have been approved by technical!”
The court will decide if the experts got it wrong, or if PPE Medpro failed to deliver to specifications. When the government tested 60 “randomly sampled” gowns for sterility in April 2022, 54 failed. PPE Medpro said the tests were a sham.
The party that loses at trial will be on the hook for £6.9 million to store the gowns and £4.7 million to destroy them.
The House of Lords Commissioners for Standards are investigating if Mone should have registered her interest in PPE Medpro or if she broke lobbying rules, and will report when the NCA have finished.
Meanwhile, Mone will continue to throw rockets at the Tory Party and Rishi Sunak, ensuring their record of waste in the pandemic remains on the agenda in a general election year.
The screaming Marys are all over this. You’d think just once the labour party could tone down the hysteria.
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I wonder will Frankie bring her back to the Pendulum summit next year?
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An interesting piece about Barrowman as well. A right piece of work.
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Hardy surprising that a bunch of arseholes and sociopaths are at the top of British politics
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He really is an asshole, and thick as a ditch.
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Rochdale by-election count tonight.
Looks like a perfect storm of Labour disowning their candidate and Israel’s genocide in Gaza could put George Galloway back in the House of Commons.
Fcuk me. The most opportunistic corrupt weasel out there.
He is all of those things and worse.
I can’t lie that part of me would like to see him tell some home truths in parliament about the genocide Israel is committing in Gaza.
The only problem with that is he’ll then turn around and glorify the genocide of Ukrainians by Russia, which is a pretty major problem.
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Galloway won comfortably on a low turnout. He’ll very likely lose in the General Election but will have 8 or 9 months where he can gather serious attention for himself.
The moral vacuum really is that great. It’s greater than I can ever recall.
https://twitter.com/LukasMukasPukas/status/1763339172578795612
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Euphemia is very bitter at the Continuity Brexit Party’s pathetic 6th place finish. They’ll need to make even more threats if they want to do better.
https://twitter.com/IsabelOakeshott/status/1763364548537385293
30% muslim population in the constituency was probably the deciding factor there
Rochdale is actually on the up as property prices squeeze folk out of Central Manchester. If they sorted out the train and ran a direct tram it would make a huge difference. It’s an awful lot nicer than it used to be. Mohamed my mechanic is there, and anywhere with him and his four sons in it is good for me. I do often leave him a bottle of “medicine for the chest” under a coat in the boot.
It used to be a lib dem stronghold. Cyril Smith done for that. I haven’t been there in some years. Have relatives up there and used to be the grimmest place you could visit
It was awful. It’s had a fair bit of work done now. It’s better.
Shut up and sit down, racially abused black woman, you have no right to speak.
“We will keep the money donated by the racist, and he’s not even a racist, hating all black women isn’t even racist, never mind misogynist.”