Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Clapping for carers... as firm’s PPE millions are moved offshore
Tory Mone in £200m deals row
TORY peer Michelle Mone posted videos of her and her billionaire husband clapping the NHS at the same time she was lobbying for PPE deals from which, it is claimed, she received millions of pounds.
Leaked documents suggest that an offshore trust linked to Baroness Mone received £29milllion.
The money seems to have originated as profits from more than £200m in PPE deals she promoted through the Government’s VIP lane, the Guardian reports.
HSBC bank documents leaked to the newspaper allegedly show
£65m in profits from the PPE deal was paid into a trust benefitting Mone’s husband
Doug Barrowman in
September 2020.
It is claimed £45.8m was then transferred out of The Warren Trust to Barrowman’s personal account, before £28.8m was transferred in October 2020 to a second trust, Keristal. Its beneficiaries are allegedly Mone and her children.
Under the hashtag “#thankyounhs”, Mone posted weekly clapping videos on Instagram in April and May 2020.
At that time, she was lobbying the Government over the PPE deals, which she did not declare in the House of Lords register of interests.
Her lawyer has insisted this was because “she did not benefit financially and was not connected”.
The bank account for the Keristal Trust, the leaks reveal, was opened in May 2020. That month, Mone had told then-cabinet Office minister Michael Gove that she could help with the PPE crisis facing the NHS.
Gove told Sky News yesterday he passed on her contact details “as I did with lots of people”.
On May 8, Mone contacted fellow Tory peer Theodore Agnew, the minister in charge of procurement, by private email, copying in Gove. She offered to supply PPE face masks, through “my team in Hong Kong”. On May 12, Anthony Page, who had been the company secretary of Mone’s firm MGM Media, helped set up PPE Medpro Ltd, the firm that would go on to win the £203m of PPE contracts. By the end of June, PPE Medpro had secured both Department of Health contracts. In October 2020, the Mirror first revealed the links between Mone and PPE Medpro. Her office told us: “Baroness Mone has no comment as she has no role or involvement in PPE Medpro. “Mr Barrowman is also not involved in the company.”
The National Crime Agency is investigating the PPE Medpro deal and in April this year raided their Isle of Man mansion and London home. A lawyer for Mone told the Guardian she had no comment. Mone is facing a separate investigation by the Lords Commissioner for Standards into whether she breached conduct rules by failing to register an interest in the company and by lobbying for it to get Government contracts. She denies wrongdoing. Labour Deputy Leader Angela Rayner told the Commons yesterday that the profits were “made possible through the company’s personal connections to Tory ministers and the Tory VIP lane”. Tory Neil O’brien said that only 10% of VIP lane bids were successful.
AT the height of the pandemic millions of pounds worth of contracts for protective kit were awarded to Conservative donors and associates.
Among those claimed to have benefitted is Tory peer Michelle Mone.
It later emerged that 25 million surgical gowns supplied by PPE Medpro – an offshore trust linked to Baroness Mone – failed an inspection and were never used by the NHS.
Lady Mone has questions to answer about her role in securing this £122million deal and why she did not declare her involvement with PPE Medpro in the register of members’ interests.
But the Tories also have questions to answer over lucrative deals handed to allies.
If they have nothing to hide they should have no objection to an independent public inquiry.