The government has won its legal claim against a company linked to the Conservative peer Michelle Mone for the return of millions of pounds paid for personal protective equipment during the Covid pandemic.
Mrs Justice Cockerill, who presided over the 12-day trial, ruled that PPE Medpro must return the full £122m it was paid by the Department of Health and Social Care for 25m sterile surgical gowns under a contract awarded in June 2020.
In her 87-page judgment, Cockerill concluded that the company had not complied with the legal and regulatory requirements to ensure that the gowns, manufactured in China, were certified and validated to be sterile.
In a statement, the company, which was ultimately owned by Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, claimed that the couple had been made “scapegoats” for the then Conservative government’s overspending on PPE during the pandemic.
The statement did not address whether and how the £122m will be repaid, for which Cockerill ordered a deadline of 15 October. The DHSC said that on 30 September, a day before the judgment was issued, an application was made to put PPE Medpro into administration. The company’s accounts, published a week before the judgment, show that it had funds of less than £1m.
The DHSC sued PPE Medpro in December 2022, arguing that it had not complied with the relevant PPE laws to ensure that the gowns were sterile.
The trial heard that the gowns were rejected after their first UK inspection in September 2020 and never used in the NHS. The gowns were labelled with a CE mark, denoting compliance with European standards, but no authorised quality assurance organisation had certified their safety and sterility.
Paul Stanley KC, representing the DHSC, argued that this meant the gowns “were invalidly CE marked … and did not comply with the law”. Stanley referred in his opening submission to a statement by a health official who had said of the gowns that “the potential impact on safety was such that they could seriously harm or kill patients and so could not be released for use”.
PPE Medpro’s barrister, Charles Samek KC, argued that the gowns had been properly manufactured and sterilised in China, and that the DHSC had agreed to the process before it awarded the contract.
“The secretary of state [for health] knew everything there was to know about my client’s offer, all cards were on the table face up, and they entered into this contract … with their eyes wide open,” Samek said in his opening.
Cockerill, however, ruled in favour of the DHSC, determining that the gowns were not validly CE marked because no quality assurance organisation, called a “notified body” had certified the manufacturing process, and that PPE Medpro had also breached the contract by failing to comply with other requirements to show the gowns had been validated as sterile.
She rejected the DHSC’s claim for a further £8m it said had been incurred storing the gowns, ruling that these costs had not been proven.
The two contracts awarded to PPE Medpro for a total £203m became the most controversial to come from the “VIP lane” operated by Boris Johnson’s Conservative government during the Covid pandemic. As thousands of companies bid for contracts to fill the UK’s depleted PPE stockpile, the VIP lane gave high priority to people with political connections.
The DHSC awarded the £122m gowns contract to PPE Medpro, and another contract worth £80.85m to supply face masks, after Mone first approached the then Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove in May 2020. The contracts were processed via the VIP lane, and the trial heard that “Baroness Mone remained active throughout” the negotiations with civil servants for the gowns contract.
Mone rose to celebrity prominence in the 2000s through her lingerie company, Ultimo, before it fell into financial difficulties, and David Cameron appointed her to the House of Lords in 2015. She and Barrowman for years publicly denied through their lawyers that they were involved in PPE Medpro, until in December 2023 the couple confirmed their involvement and Barrowman said he was the company’s ultimate beneficial owner.
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. Barrowman acknowledged in a BBC interview in December 2023 that he had been paid more than £60m and transferred money into the trust; the couple said that his children were beneficiaries as well.
The high court case was separate to an ongoing investigation by the National Crime Agency, begun in May 2021, into whether Mone and Barrowman committed any criminal offences during the process of procuring the contracts. Mone and Barrowman have denied any criminal wrongdoing.
After the judgment, the health secretary, Wes Streeting, said: “PPE Medpro put NHS staff and patients in danger with substandard kit whilst lining their own pockets with taxpayers’ money at a time of national crisis. Today’s court ruling makes clear we won’t stand for it and we’re coming after every penny owed to our NHS. This government will ruthlessly pursue any company which tried to exploit the pandemic for their own ends while our health service was fighting to save lives.
“PPE Medpro must now repay the government and the taxpayer £122m. My department will work closely with PPE Medpro Limited’s administrators to recover everything we can.”
