A judge today ordered PPE Medpro, a company linked to former lingerie entrepreneur Baroness Michelle Mone, to repay the UK Government more than £121m for breaching a medical supplies contract.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) sued PPE Medpro over allegations that it breached a deal for the gowns as they were sterile.
PPE Medpro is a consortium led by Baroness Mone’s husband Doug Barrowman that was awarded government contracts by the former Conservative government to supply personal protective equipment (PPE) during the pandemic. Baroness Mone recommended the firm to ministers.
Her legal representatives claimed the gowns became defective due to the conditions they were kept in after being delivered to the DHSC.
Mrs Justice Cockerill today found that PPE Medpro “has breached the contract” and the DHSC was “entitled to the price of the gowns as damages” as they “could not be used as sterile gowns”. She ruled the Government was not entitled to the costs of storing the gowns.
The judge said that payment was due by 15 October.
Mr Barrowman described the judgment as a “travesty of justice”.
“She gave the DHSC an Establishment win despite the mountain of evidence in court against such a judgment,“ he told PA Media.
“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.”
On Tuesday Baroness Mone, 53, who is on leave of absence from the House of Lords, claimed in a social media post that she was being made a “scapegoat” for the PPE scandal after it emerged her husband’s company is on the brink of collapse.
The Tory peer and former lingerie entrepreneur also said the government had turned down multi-million-pound offers to settle a High Court legal battle with the company.
Mone posted a message on X on Tuesday that read: “For the past seven months, I have stayed silent.
“But the truth is, I have endured five years of pure torture, relentless press and media attacks, every single day, without responding. Enough is enough. It is time for the public to know the truth.
“This case was never about gowns or money. It has always been about politics and blame-shifting, a way to cover up the government’s disastrous £10 billion PPE write-off. 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. Meanwhile, the public can see with their own eyes images of PPE worth billions dumped in fields and warehouses across the country.”
Mone claimed that recent television documentaries had edited her interviews to “fit a predetermined narrative”.
At the Labour party conference on Tuesday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who has launched a crackdown on Covid fraud, joked that the government did have a vendetta against Baroness Michelle Mone.
She told a fringe event at Labour’s party conference: “Michelle Mone, remember her, she’s come out today and said that the government has got a vendetta against her. Too right we do.”
An application to appoint administrators to take over the running of PPE Medpro was filed on Tuesday, days after the company announced it had net assets of just £666,025.
Glasgow-born Mone made her breakthrough as the creator of Ultimo, her lingerie company, and she was elevated to the Lords by former PM David Cameron in 2015 who believed she could apply some of her entrepreneurial experience. She lost the Tory whip in 2022 and now sits as an independent peer though she is on indefinite leave.
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