The Department for Health and Social Care is suing PPE Medpro for £130m after Baroness Mone acted as an introducer, saying the gowns were not sterile and unfit for use – the company denies the claims
Conservative peer Baroness Michelle Mone was told by a boss of a PPE firm that it would be disappointing if the company made little or no profit, the High Court heard.
Her husband Doug Barrowman was at the court yesterday for the second day of a £130million trial over PPE Medpro, a company he backed. The Department of Health and Social Care is seeking the return of £122m it spent on surgical gowns bought during the pandemic along with £8.6m in storage and transportation costs.
The High Court heard that the gowns were not sterile and unusable in the NHS when delivered in 2020. PPE Medpro said it “categorically denies” breaching the contract, and its lawyers claimed it has been “singled out for unfair treatment”. The company was backed by a consortium led by Mr Barrowman and the initial contact with the government’s PPE team came from Baroness Mone.
Written submissions in the case state that Baroness Mone was told by firm boss Anthony Page that it would be “extremely disappointing” if it made little or no profit. A few days before the contract was signed for 25 million gowns, fewer than the 50 million originally proposed, Mr Page wrote to her, saying: “Tomorrow we will submit our best price. As I said our margin will be tiny or possibly nothing at all as we have bought all the production capacity upfront. We really need to achieve a positive outcome to this extremely disappointing situation.”
Opening the trial on Wednesday, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said: “This case is simply about whether 25 million surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro were faulty.” Mr Stanley said 99.9999% of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract – equating to one in a million being unusable. 140 gowns were later tested for sterility, with 103 failing, and he added: “Whatever was done to sterilise the gowns had not achieved its purpose, because more than one in a million of them was contaminated when delivered.
Mr Stanley said that the gowns were “unusable in the NHS or any other setting”, adding: “Without the relevant assurances of conformity that the gowns met sterility requirements, the potential impact on safety was such that they could seriously harm or kill patients and so could not be released for use.”
In his written submissions, Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, said the “only plausible reason” for the gowns becoming contaminated was due to “the transport and storage conditions or events the gowns were subject”, after they had been delivered.
He added the testing did not happen until several months after the gowns were rejected, and the samples selected were not “representative of the whole population”, meaning “no proper conclusions may be drawn”.
He said the DHSC’s claim was “contrived and opportunistic” and PPE Medpro had been “made the ‘fall guy’ for a catalogue of failures and errors” by the department. He said: “It has perhaps been singled out because of the high profiles of those said to be associated with PPE Medpro, and/or because it is perceived to be a supplier with financial resources behind it.
“In reality, an archetypal case of ‘buyer’s remorse’, where DHSC simply seeks to get out of a bargain it wished it never entered into, left, as it is, with over £8 billion of purchased and unused PPE as a result of an untrammelled and uncontrolled buying spree with taxpayers’ money.”
Bra tycoon Baroness Mone, 53, and Isle of Manbased entrepreneur Mr Barrowman, 60, who wed in 2020, both deny wrongdoing. They are facing a separate National Crime Agency investigation into PPE Medpro. A PPE Medpro spokesman said it “categorically denies breaching its obligations” and will “robustly defend” the claim. The trial is due to last five weeks, with a judgment expected at a later date.