Capital Economy, Business and Finance
After three years of denials, Baroness Mone of Mayfair has admitted being involved with a company that was paid £203 million by the UK government at the height of the pandemic for protective wear, half of which was unusable. In a series of articles starting in 2022, the Guardian reported Mone’s connection to PPE MedPro via her husband, Douglas Barrowman, a businessman based in the Isle of Man. The paper also set out how Mone herself, a former lingerie tycoon elevated to the House of Lords by David Cameron, used a “VIP lane” set up by the Conservatives in 2020 to fast-track PPE contracts for companies with links to the party or government. Mone and Barrowman repeatedly denied the reports and a lawyer for Mone wrote to the Guardian in 2022 to say it had been “placed on notice on numerous occasions” that she had no involvement in the running of PPE MedPro or the process by which it won its PPE contracts. A representative for the couple, who are alleged to have put £29 million of the contracts’ proceeds in a trust for Mone and her children, now admits her involvement and says the government knew about it all along. Fancy that.