Will this scandal SINK Baroness BRA?
As the Tory peer and her billionaire husband are alleged to have made tens of millions from a PPE firm she lobbied ministers over...
Fresh from a blissful Caribbean holiday with the billionaire who would become her second husband, a giddy-in-love Michelle Mone declared on Twitter that within three years she would ‘cash in’ on her good fortune.
After all, the former lingerie tycoon told her million followers, she’d been ‘working full-time since I was 15’. It was time to ‘put my feet up’.
The opportunity to do so came along far sooner than even she could have predicted. For barely two years after that luxurious sojourn in March 2018 on the island of st Barts — and with Britain in the early grip of the coronavirus pandemic — the beleaguered Nhs was struggling to find enough protective clothing and equipment for its frontline staff.
step forward Baroness Mone of Mayfair OBe who, with apparent determination to save the day, swiftly recommended a company called PPe Medpro Ltd as a potential supplier and set to work lobbying senior government ministers.
Alas, it has been claimed that she didn’t mention her own, or her fiance Douglas Barrowman’s connection to the company which was later awarded two contracts, worth £203 million, for face masks and sterile hospital gowns.
Nor did she let it be known that the company she was recommending was so new it had not yet even been incorporated. The new business was formally registered at Companies house on May 12, 2020 — five days after Mone had emailed top Tory ministers, including Michael Gove at the Cabinet Office, identifying the company as a potential supplier.
It was set up with just £100 invested as share capital — a microscopic amount given the millions it would soon be channelling. On paper, the company’s sole registered owner was Anthony Page — one of Barrowman’s employees in the Isle of Man.
But a financial chain uncovered this week links the firm directly to Barrowman and Mone.
Medpro transferred £65 million of its profits to an Isle of Man-registered trust that solely benefits Barrowman. Of that amount, £45.8 milliion went into Barrowman’s personal bank account. From there, £28.8 million was moved to another offshore Isle of Man trust, this time benefiting 51-year-old Mone and her children.
THE allegations, which appeared in the Guardian newspaper on Thursday, are worrying indeed, not least because of the multiple denials previously issued by the Tory peer that she did not benefit financially from PPe Medpro. Lawyers for Barrowman also claimed that he was ‘not an investor, director or shareholder in PPe Medpro’ and ‘never had any role or function in PPe Medpro’.
so far, so concerning. But the scale of the scandal goes much further than that. For as well as the gargantuan personal kickback Mone appears to have enjoyed, is the fact that half of the equipment supplied by PPe Medpro — 25 million hospital gowns costing £122 million — turned out to be unfit for purpose and was never used by the Nhs.
A further twist is the fact that the unusable gowns were bought from a Chinese manufacturer for £46 million before being sold to the Department of health for almost three times that amount.
This week Glaswegian-born mother-of-three Mone issued a warning that she was ‘considering legal action’ and that ‘there are a number of reasons why she cannot comment beyond that’.
In fact, having previously flooded Instagram with glossy images of her fabulous wealthy life along with trite messages about the importance of selfbelief, loving yourself and ‘creating your own fairy tale’, the once loquacious social media user has been somewhat quiet of late.
she has maintained a virtual social media silence since the beginning of the year but after the latest allegations emerged on Thursday, Lady (Michelle) Mone OBe, as she likes to style herself, popped up online, sharing a cryptic meme with the words: ‘Don’t believe everything you read or everything you think.’
In response to that, her account was deluged by thousands of outraged Twitter users, some of whose tweets are unrepeatable here.
An unsavoury state of affairs then for ‘Baroness Bra’ who made her name as the founder of the now defunct Ultimo lingerie brand.
For while the apparently charming rags-to-riches tale of her rise from the povertystricken back streets of Glasgow to become one of the UK’s most famous, rich and thrusting businesswomen, the events of the past year have seen this working-class heroine endure an extraordinary fall from grace and one which is apparently not over yet.
It was this time last year that Mone’s name was first linked to PPe Medpro after a freedom of information request saw the publication of a list of the 47 companies awarded £4.7 billion worth of government PPe contracts after referrals from politicians and officials.
Due to the Covid crisis, many were awarded without competitive tender, via a fast-track ‘VIP lane’ which the high Court has since declared was illegal. At the time, Mone denied that she had ‘any role or function in PPe Medpro, nor in the process by which contracts were awarded to PPe Medpro’.
ASKED why she had not included PPe Medpro in her house of Lords register of financial interests, her lawyer said: ‘ Baroness Mone did not declare any interest as she did not benefit financially and was not connected to PPe Medpro in any capacity.’
But according to the Guardian this week, leaked documents, produced by hsBC bank, appear to show that Barrowman was paid at least £65 million in profits from PPe Medpro and then distributed the funds through a series of offshore accounts, trusts and companies.
In October 2020, just five
months after Mone helped PPE Medpro secure its contracts, Barrowman transferred £28.8 million to a trust set up to benefit Mone and her three adult children.
By April this year, the National Crime Agency had launched a fraud investigation, raiding six properties connected to Mone and her 57-year-old husband, including their grand Isle of Man manor house and Mone’s London base in Belgravia.
She was already under investigation by the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards for breaking its code of conduct by failing to declare her interest to PPE Medpro. According to the most recent update on the Parliament website, the matter is now also the subject of an ongoing criminal investigation.
An unseemly turn of events for a Conservative peer of the realm, a woman ennobled by David Cameron in 2015 after playing a leading role in the anti-independence campaign in her native Scotland.
He had previously appointed her as his government’s ‘entrepreneurship tsar’ in the expectation that she would encourage disadvantaged people in areas of high unemployment to start up companies.
According to her own website, Mone’s latest business ventures (she sold Ultimo in 2014) include a range of dress jewellery sold via the QVC shopping channel and a new ‘business and lifestyle’ app, ‘Connect 2 Michelle Mone’, which offers free advice, guidance and inspiration to ‘ Discover the ultimate U’ with extra tips ‘to take your life to the next level’ for those who pay for the ‘Connect Plus’ service.
The app trumpets Mone as ‘ a shining example of how flair, hard work and true grit can lead to global success’ and describes her as ‘one of the world’s most in-demand public speakers and mentors’. Elsewhere on her website, ‘one of the most high-profile entrepreneurs in the world’ waxes lyrical about realising her ‘experience and wisdom could transform lives and inspire others in the face of adversity’.
The desire to inspire others appears to be behind many of Mone’s social media posts.
Take this one from Instagram in December 2021 which was accompanied by a photo of a tanned Michelle in a swimming costume on a hammock. ‘It doesn’t come easy unless you work hard for it,’ reads the accompanying text, ‘but when you do — it makes it all worth it.’
Posting another glam photo of herself the same month, she wrote: ‘Find what makes you tick and make it your job — then you will never have to work a day in your life.’
Many of her posts promote her own perception of herself, as a super-smart businesswoman who clawed her way to the top.
‘I left school at 15 without a penny to my name,’ she reminded her followers in November 2021. ‘The only thing I owned was determination and a can-do attitude.’ And until she became embroiled in the PPE scandal, she really did appear to be living the dream. Endless trips abroad with husband Barrowman; St Barts, where Barrowman has a home, is a favourite destination for the pair.
Skiing trips by private jet and holidays in the Maldives and the South of France on board a £10 million yacht called Lady M. That yacht, by the way, is owned by a firm whose director is Anthony Page.
All in all then, not bad for a woman who grew up in the Glasgow’s East End and claims her childhood bedroom was a ‘cupboard’ in her parents’ room in their tenement building.
By her own account, she was the city’s best- selling Avon rep at the age of 13 after persuading her mother to sign up to the door-todoor cosmetics company on her behalf.
At 17 she met her first husband Michael Mone, with whom she founded Ultimo. Pregnant with their elder daughter at 18, they went on to have another daughter and a son. But their marriage foundered after 20 years when it was alleged Michael became close to an employee, whom he has since married. He always denied that the relationship started while he was still with Michelle.
She met twice- divorced fellow Glaswegian Barrowman, who grew up three miles away from Mone, at a business meeting at private members’ club, 5 Hertford Street, in London in the autumn of 2017.
Virtually unknown outside the financial circles in the North West where he made his fortune, fatherof-four Barrowman is said to have become rich via the private equity business he started as a young man before decamping to the Isle of Man where there is no corporation or capital gains tax and a £200,000 limit on income tax.
It was there that he set up the Knox Group which employs 5,000 people worldwide and boasts assets of more than £1 billion.
Drawn together by a shared narrative of overcoming the odds to make their fortunes, their publicist at the time told the Mail: ‘When they got talking they couldn’t believe how much they had in common. They knew all the same people and places from their past.’
They also clearly shared the same taste for the high life. As well as whisking Mone away to homes in France, Thailand, Wales and the Caribbean, soon after that first meeting they took their first holiday, cruising off the French Riviera on his £20 million, 183 ft super-yacht with its handmade silk carpets, underwater scooters and a ‘seven-star’ service.
As their romance galloped apace, so did their joint business ventures. By the end of 2017, they had set up a Mayfair-registered company MMI Global Unlimited in which Mone had a 49 per cent stake and Barrowman’s company, Knox Ltd, had 51 per cent.
Mone announced their engagement in December 2018 with photos of her stunning eight carat diamond ring. The pair married in November 2020 on the Isle of Man with Mone in a virginal white Suzanne Neville dress.
She had wanted the ceremony to take place at the 13th century Chapel of St Mary Undercroft at the Palace of Westminster but had to change her plans to get around Covid restrictions.
UNTIL the beginning of this year, the new Mrs Barrowman certainly appeared to be living the dream, posting endless photographs of herself either in exotic locations or in one of the couple’s glamorous, interiordesigned homes.
Aside from the financial scandal in which she is now embroiled, life has not been entirely plain sailing, however. In August, she was forced to pay a settlement understood to be more than £50,000 to settle a libel claim from a former friend of Indian heritage who had previously accused her of sending him a racist message calling him him ‘a waste of a man’s white skin’.
At the time, Mone insisted that the saying was not racist and that she believed that Richard LyntonJones was ‘100 per cent white and British’.
Famously thick- skinned, Mone has, in the past, prided herself on not caring what others think of her.
Whether or not that holds true given the latest damning accusations about her business activities, remains to be seen. Aside from the criminal inquiry and the investigation by the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards, the Department of Health is seeking to recover the money it spent on the unusable hospital gowns via a dispute resolution process with PPE Medpro.
The company has maintained that it complied with the terms of its gowns contract and is entitled to keep the money it was paid.
In the Commons yesterday, health minister Neil O’Brien said discussions were ongoing but could lead to litigation.
‘We haven’t got to the point where a satisfactory agreement has been reached at this stage,’ he said.
What the future holds for Baroness Mone of Mayfair in the midst of this spiralling scandal remains to be seen. She faces expulsion from the House of Lords if she is found guilty of breaking its code of conduct. Fraud, meanwhile, carries a maximum jail sentence of ten years.
While she waits to find out her fate, she could do worse than to reflect on some of the advice she has, in the past, been so keen to dish out to others.
‘Never get too big for your boots!’ she wrote on Instagram on November 23, 2021, just a few days before she tied the knot with Barrowman.
‘You might be a big fish . . . but there will aways be a bigger pond. I constantly have a voice in the back of my head reminding me that I could lose it all tomorrow.’