Firm linked to Michelle Mone must repay £122m to Government after breaching Covid PPE contract

A High Court judge has ruled that a company linked to Tory peer Baroness Michelle Mone must repay nearly £122m to the Government after breaching a contract to supply surgical gowns during the Covid pandemic.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) sued PPE Medpro, saying the company had provided 25 million “faulty” gowns that were not 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.

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 wanted to recover the costs of the £121m contract, as well as the costs of transporting and storing the items, which amount to an additional £8,648,691.

Mrs Justice Cockerill gave her ruling at around 10.30am on Wednesday.

Mr Barrowman blasted the PPE Medpro judgment as a “travesty of justice”.

In a written statement Mone’s husband, a businessman who led the consortium, said: “Today, a travesty of justice took place following the judgment of Lady Justice Cockerill.

“She gave the DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) an Establishment win despite the mountain of evidence in court against such a judgment.

“Her judgment bears little resemblance to what actually took place during the month-long trial, where PPE Medpro convincingly demonstrated that its gowns were sterile.

“This judgment is a whitewash of the facts and shows that justice was being seen to be done, where the outcome was always certain for the DHSC and the Government. This case was simply too big for the Government to lose.”

Ahead of the ruling, PPE Medpro filed a “notice of appointment to appoint an administrator” on Tuesday.

Baroness Mone also accused the Government of “scapegoating” her and Mr Barrowman in a post on X, in which she claimed that the company had offered to settle the case.

She said: “Doug and I have been deliberately scapegoated and vilified in an orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement.

“The Government decided to make us the poster couple for the PPE scandal, a convenient distraction to take the blame off them.”

She continued that instead of settling the case, the DHSC “chose to spend a staggering £5m of taxpayers’ money pursuing litigation against a company they knew had no funds”.

In court documents from May this year, the DHSC said the gowns were delivered to the UK in 72 lots between August and October 2020, with £121,999,219.20 paid to PPE Medpro between July and August that year.

The department rejected the gowns in December 2020 and told the company it would have to repay the money, but this has not happened, and the gowns remain in storage, unable to be used.

During the trial, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said 99.9999% of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract, equating to one in a million being unusable.

The DHSC claims the contract also specified PPE Medpro had to sterilise the gowns using a “validated process”, attested by CE marking, which indicates a product has met certain medical standards.

Mr Stanley said “none of those things happened”, with no validated sterilisation process being followed, and the gowns supplied with invalid CE marking.

He also said that 140 gowns were later tested for sterility, with 103 failing.

Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, said at the close of the trial that the Government had ordered 10 years’ worth of excess gowns by December 2020 and that it was suffering from “buyer’s remorse”.

He said the DHSC approved the gowns without seeing a valid CE mark and that PPE Medpro “did not pretend” to have one because it did not need it.

After delivery, the gowns were kept in shipping containers for “at least three months”, he added, and that contamination likely occurred “most probably during the subsequent transportation, storage and handling of the tested gowns”.