Thursday, October 02, 2025
The pandemic profiteer
The Independent reports that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) had sued PPE Medpro at the High Court, claiming the company had breached the deal because the 25 million gowns it provided were “faulty” by not being sterile:
The company, a consortium led by Lady Mone’s husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, was awarded government contracts by the former Conservative administration to supply PPE during the pandemic, after she recommended it to ministers.
She then acted as the firm’s “big gun” in talks with officials to help get the contract over the line, High Court judge Mrs Justice Cockerill said on Wednesday.
In her 87-page ruling, Mrs Justice Cockerill said the gowns “were not, contractually speaking, sterile, or properly validated as being sterile” which meant they could not be used in the NHS.
The ruling was celebrated by ministers, including health secretary Wes Streeting, who said the government was “coming after every penny owed to our NHS” as part of a plan to claw back money lost during the pandemic.
Families bereaved in the pandemic also welcomed the judgement and called for Baroness Mone to be stripped of her peerage.
But Baroness Mone said the ruling was a win for the “establishment”, while Mr Barrowman said it was a “travesty of justice”.
Both denied wrongdoing and neither gave evidence at the trial in June, while lawyers for the DHSC said they were “not concerned with any profits made by anybody” and that the case was “simply about compliance”.
The government is now recovering the cost of the £121m contract, as well as the costs of transporting and storing the items, which amount to an additional £8.6m.
Court documents from May reveal the DHSC said the gowns were delivered to the UK in 72 shipments between August and October 2020, with £121,999,219.20 paid to PPE Medpro between July and August that year.
In December 2020, the gowns were rejected by DHSC and the company was told it would need to repay the money. But the company did not, and the gowns remained in storage unable to be used.
During the trial, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said 99.9999 per cent of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract.
The DHSC claims the contract also specified PPE Medpro had to sterilise the gowns using a “validated process”; this included a CE marking to show it met certain medical standards.
However, according to Mr Stanley, “none of this happened”, and out of the 140 gowns later tested for sterility, 103 failed the test.
Justice has at last been done, though I am still boggling a bit that a Tory peer, who was on the Tory government VIP list of suppliers, is claiming to be a victim of the 'establishment'.
