Conservative peer Michelle Mone will take a leave of absence from the House of Lords “with immediate effect” as she seeks “to clear her name” over Covid contract allegations which her PR team says have been “unjustly levelled against her”.
Baroness Mone has faced allegations of financially benefiting from PPE Medpro, a company that she recommended for a government contract during the Covid-19 pandemic.
During her leave of absence, a decision which she took upon herself, Baroness Mone will not attend the Lords, be permitted to claim allowance, or vote on any items of business.
The House of Lords commissioner has placed Baroness Mone under investigation for her “alleged involvement” in procuring Covid contracts for PPE Medpro. However, at the time of writing the commissioner has not published his report on the probe owing to the fact that the issue is also being investigated “by the police or another agency as part of a criminal investigation”.
This comes after properties linked to the business were searched by the National Crime Agency earlier in 2022.
What happened with PPE Medpro during the pandemic?
Between May and June 2020, the company secured two government contracts worth £203 million, which would see it supply PPE items such as masks and medical gowns.
The company was only registered in May 2020, during the first Covid lockdown, and the first contract it won had not been opened to competition due to the urgency of the crisis.
But by mid-December 2020, the BBC had released a report saying that £122 million worth of gowns that the company had provided had not been used.
PPE Medpro said that it had delivered on the contract entirely under the specified terms, which including clear parameters for the “technical specification and performance criteria of the products”.
A mediation process between government and the business is underway today over what the Department of Health said was an “underperforming contract” on the part of PPE Medpro.
What was Baroness Mone’s alleged involvement?
Some of the evidence linking Baroness Mone to the business include a set of emails which show her referring the company to ministers during the early weeks of the crisis.
Later, an investigation piece published in the Guardian in November this year alleged that Baroness Mone had secretly received £29 million originating from PPE Medpro’s profits, as proven by leaked documentation.
Baroness Mone’s lawyers had said back in December 2020 that the Tory peer had “no role or function in PPE Medpro, nor in the process by which contracts were awarded to PPE Medpro”.
Baroness Mone has refused to comment on the allegations that she financially benefited from the company.
Matt Hancock, who was health secretary during the pandemic, has separately accused Baroness Mone of taking an aggressive or threatening approach when attempting to secure a separate government contract for the supply of Covid tests.
While Hancock did not disclose which firm this related to, reports in the Daily Mail say that it involved a different company to PPE Medpro.
The test for Covid test supply ultimately was not awarded to the firm that Baroness Mone recommended.
What has the reaction been?
When the Guardian news story broke, Labour deputy leader Angela Rayner said that the government had failed to do its “due diligence” before awarding contracts to PPE Medpro and that it was guilty of a “conflict of interest”.
Rayner told fellow MPs in the House of Commons that it appeared “tens of millions of pounds” from the money awarded to the company had “ended up in offshore accounts connected to the individuals involved”.
Rayner and the Labour party are tabling a motion in the Commons on Tuesday in a bid to force the government to publish further correspondence, documents and advice relating to PPE Medpro’s Covid contracts.
Elsewhere, Downing Street has stopped short of commenting on the matter and on Baroness Mone’s decision to take a leave of absence from the House of Lords, highlighting the ongoing mediation process between PPE Medpro and the government.
However, the Department of Health continues to insist that “due diligence was carried out on all companies that were referred to the department and every company was subjected to the same checks”.
The government department added: “We acted swiftly to procure PPE [personal protective equipment] at the height of the pandemic, competing in an overheated global market where demand massively outstripped supply.”
Facing calls to expel Baroness Mone from the Conservative parliamentary party, Number 10 has said that it is a matter for the party whips to rule on.
Photo by Jan Kopřiva on Unsplash
