‘COME CLEAN OVER £18bn COVID DEALS’

PUBLIC TRUST ‘IN PERIL’ AS SPENDING OF TAXPAYERS’ CASH SOARS, SAYS WATCHDOG

BILLIONS of pounds in coronavirus spending is unaccounted for, auditors warned yesterday, with government cronies accused of ‘profiting from the pandemic’.

The National Audit Office (NAO) said public trust was in peril after ministers tore up spending rules as they awarded contracts worth £18billion, with more than half still secret after at least four months.

Meg Hillier, who chairs the parliamentary public accounts committee, said: ‘The government needs to come

clean and immediately publish all the contracts it’s awarded so far. What’s the big secret?’

The NAO found some of the 8,600 contracts up to July 31 were awarded after work had been carried out.

Its report comes days after private healthcare giant Randox was awarded a £347million extension to its test processing contract, despite having to recall 750,000 flawed test kits.

The company pays Tory MP Owen Paterson £100,000 a year to sit on its board and its contract was among ones worth £10.5billion awarded without any competition. Firms were ten times more likely to win personal protective equipment (PPE) contracts if they were recommended by ministers, their officials, MPs or Lords, the NAO said.

PR company Public First was handed £840,000 by the Cabinet Office, run by Michael Gove, after it had started working ‘informally’ on communications and without public tender.

Its owner Rachel Wolf previously worked for Mr Gove and co-wrote the Conservative Party’s election manifesto. ‘We found a lack of documentation recording the process for choosing the supplier, the justification for using emergency procurement or any considerations around potential conflicts of interest,’ the NAO said.

Ayanda Capital – a Mauritius-based currency trading and offshore property company – won a £253million contract for PPE masks after a recommendation from Andrew Mills, who also advises international trade secretary Liz Truss.

None of the 50million masks supplied met clinical standards.

Spanish go-between Gabriel Gonzalez Andersson was paid £21million by the taxpayer to fulfil a PPE order signed with Florida jewellery designer Michael Saiger’s company Saiger LLC, which was given contracts worth £200million without competition.

‘We do not understand why, as late as June, government was still making direct awards of contracts sufficiently lucrative as to enable these sorts of profits to be made,’ Jolyon Maugham, of the Good Law Project told the BBC.

Labour shadow Cabinet Office minister Rachel Reeves said: ‘ The country deserves to know friends and donors to the Conservative party aren’t profiting from this pandemic.’

The NAO did not look at whether the contracts provided value for money.

In May, Boris Johnson promised a ‘world-beating’ test and trace system. But Sage has said contact tracing’s impact is ‘marginal’, with contact rates far below the required 80 per cent.

Ministers did not specify what proportion of contacts had to be reached when it gave Serco the deal for contact tracing, Channel 4’s Dispatches reported. It found leaking test kits, tests thrown out with the rubbish and suspected cross-contamination at the Randox plant in Co. Antrim.

Former World Health Organization director Prof Anthony Costello called Channel 4’s findings ‘breath-taking’.

‘It amounts to criminal negligence, pure and simple,’ he added.

Randox denied any cross-contamination at its plant and said ‘staff are trained to ensure that samples are correctly processed’. NAO head Gareth Davies said it recognised the pandemic was an ‘exceptional circumstance’ but

‘It’s an unprecedented global pandemic... we needed to procure contracts with urgency’

transparency standards were not met and it remained essential decisions were made transparent ‘to maintain public trust that taxpayers’ money is being spent appropriately and fairly’.

Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez said the government was dealing with an ‘unprecedented global pandemic’.

‘We needed to procure contracts with extreme urgency to secure the vital supplies required to protect front-line NHS workers and the public and we make no apology for that,’ she added.

Ms Lopez said ‘robust processes’ were in place to get critical equipment where it is needed while ‘ensuring value for money for the taxpayer’.