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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.
The Department of Health and Social Care sued the company, PPE Medpro, in December 2022, arguing that it had not complied with PPE laws to ensure that 25m surgical gowns it provided under a June 2020 government contract were sterile.
The trial heard that the gowns, for which the DHSC paid £122m, were rejected after their first UK inspection in September 2020 and never used in the NHS. The gowns, manufactured in China, 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, ultimately owned by Mone’s husband, the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, defended the claim in court. The company’s barrister, Charles Samek KC, argued that the gowns were properly manufactured and sterilised in China, and that the DHSC 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.
The judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill, who heard the five-week trial at London’s Rolls Building in the summer, ruled in favour of the DHSC and ordered PPE Medpro to repay the full £122m plus additional costs and interest.
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 then 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 over the contract to supply sterile surgical gowns 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.
It emerged during the trial that in December 2023 the DHSC had applied for the high court case to be paused until after any criminal proceedings were concluded, based on an argument from the NCA that this would be in the interests of justice. Samek said that PPE Medpro had opposed the application, and then the DHSC did not proceed with it.
