The High Court has ordered a firm linked to Baroness Michelle Mone to repay £122m to the government after breaching a personal protective equipment contract during the Covid pandemic.
In 2020, PPE Medpro – a consortium led by Mone’s husband, Doug Barrowman – was awarded Government contracts to supply personal protective equipment after she recommended it to ministers.
But the Department of Health rejected the gowns because they were unsterile, and told the company to repay the money, which did not happen.
Now, the High Court has ordered PPE Medpro to repay the full £122m, with interest, to the government by October 15.
Mrs Justice Cockerill ruled that PPE Medpro had breached their contract with the government, with the gowns not complying with a “validated sterilisation process.”
The dodgy equipment supplied by PPE Medpro became one of the biggest PPE scandals from the Covid pandemic. Mone had recommended the company to the government through the ‘VIP lane’, and initially denied having any links to her husband’s firm.
But in 2023, she admitted to the BBC that this was a lie, and revealed her and her children stood to gain from the profits of around £60m, which had been placed into a trust by her husband.
Mone insisted she had done nothing wrong aside from denying her links to the company though.
After the gowns were rejected by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), they remained in storage costing £61,000 a week.
Mrs Justice Cockerill said the department cannot claim back the total of £8m it has spent on the storage costs.
The judge said the DHSC did not “effectively reject the gowns”, highlighting that the department had an agent who could have inspected the gowns in China, before they arrived in the UK.
In a statement to the BBC after the ruling, a spokesperson for Barrowman said it was a “travesty of justice.”
They said the judge’s ruling “bears little resemblance to what actually took place during the month-long trial, where PPE Medpro convincingly demonstrated that its gowns were sterile.”