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The
Saturday read
Michelle
Mone
Will UK
taxpayers get their £122m back from PPE Medpro?
David
Conn
The high
court told the company linked to Michelle Mone to pay up over the supply of
defective gowns, but there appears no clear route to reclaim the funds
Sat 11
Oct 2025 01.00 EDT
The
five-year unravelling of Britain’s most high-profile Covid contracts scandal
involving a baroness, her husband and multimillion-pound government deals
accelerated last week with a high court judgment against the company linked to
the former Tory peer Michelle Mone.
The
judge, Mrs Justice Cockerill, ruled that PPE Medpro, owned by Mone’s husband,
the Isle of Man-based businessman Doug Barrowman, supplied defective personal
protective equipment (PPE) for use in the NHS during the pandemic. Cockerill
ordered that PPE Medpro must return the sum of £122m, which the Department of
Health and Social Care paid for the order of 25m sterile surgical gowns, under
a contract awarded in June 2020 via the VIP lane.
The
chancellor, Rachel Reeves, hailed the judgment as vindication for the Labour
government’s stated determination to recover some of the billions of pounds in
public money wasted during the Covid crisis by Boris Johnson’s administration.
“We want
our money back. We are getting our money back,” Reeves posted on X. “And it
will go where it belongs – in our schools, NHS and communities.”
The June
contract, and another worth £80.85m to supply face masks, also paid for by the
DHSC, were granted to PPE Medpro after Mone approached the then Cabinet Office
minister Michael Gove in May 2020. Her offer was processed via the “VIP lane”,
the system operated by Johnson’s government, giving priority to politically
connected people such as Mone, treating them as more credible than experienced
PPE suppliers. For years afterwards, Mone and Barrowman through their former
lawyers denied involvement in PPE Medpro, until in late 2023 they acknowledged
their roles and Mone admitted they had lied.
The gowns
were rejected on inspection in September 2020 at the NHS warehousing facilities
in Daventry, Northamptonshire, because their labels were invalid, and also
signalled that they had not been certified as sterile, a life-protecting
requirement. Cockerill ordered that the £122m be repaid by 15 October.
Yet in
this apparent tale of British justice finally restoring taxpayers’ millions
paid out for unsafe medical supplies, there is a looming snag. The judgment is
not against Barrowman personally, but his company, which has been left with
very little money or assets. In fact, on 30 September, the day before Cockerill
delivered her judgment, PPE Medpro Ltd was put into insolvency and
administrators appointed.
So
although the company has until Wednesday to repay the £122m, there appears no
realistic possibility that it can. In a series of public statements since the
judgment, Mone has accused Reeves of inflammatory language after the chancellor
jokingly confirmed that the government had “a vendetta” against the couple, and
Barrowman has repeatedly said the judgment was wrong, “a white wash [sic] of
the facts”. Neither had given any indication that they intended to fund the
repayment of the money, until a new statement on Friday evening when their
spokesperson said for the first time that the PPE Medpro “consortium” was
prepared to discuss “a possible settlement with the government”.
In
November 2022, the Guardian revealed that Barrowman had been paid at least £65m
from PPE Medpro’s profits, then transferred £29m to a trust set up to benefit
Mone and her three adult children. The couple said in a BBC interview in
December 2023 that Barrowman’s children were also beneficiaries of the trust.
In a
statement on 4 October, Barrowman’s spokesperson hit out at PPE Medpro’s
supply-chain companies, saying the administrator could bring legal claims
against them. It is difficult to see the basis for this, given that PPE Medpro
accepted the gowns five years ago and has always argued they complied with the
DHSC contract. Barrowman describes PPE Medpro and its supply-chain companies as
a consortium.
Barrowman’s
spokesperson confirmed PPE Medpro’s profits, saying of the £203m from the DHSC,
the company paid £137m to the supply-chain companies to source and buy the PPE,
which left a profit of £66m for Barrowman’s company. Of that, according to the
spokesperson’s figures, PPE Medpro made a £39m profit on the contract for the
gowns that were never used.
However,
although Barrowman made so much from the PPE Medpro deals, and the couple have
over the years owned luxury yachts, a private jet and prestige properties in
different locations, there is no clear route to the government recovering even
a penny after the judgment.
The
Guardian asked the couple’s spokesperson this week if Barrowman intended to
provide the £122m so that PPE Medpro could repay the DHSC. The spokesperson
replied: “We are unable to comment on any matters that relate directly to PPE
Medpro Ltd. This is not an attempt to avoid your questions. PPE Medpro is now
in administration and only the administrators are able to comment on the
company. It is vital to make clear, to avoid any misunderstanding, that the
court case and subsequent ruling was against PPE Medpro, NOT Mr Barrowman.”
The
Guardian asked the spokesperson to clarify if that meant Barrowman and Mone did
not intend to fund the return of the £122m, or repay any of the money received
from PPE Medpro profits. The spokesperson replied: “This is not what my
statement said at all, and is a huge leap and incorrect for you to reach this
conclusion. Let me be clear: ‘At no stage have we stated that Mr Barrowman has
no intention of making any payment to the DHSC. We have been clear that we
cannot answer any questions regarding PPE Medpro.’”
The
spokesperson added: “Furthermore, you include Baroness Mone – why? She received
no money from the DHSC contract. Her involvement as an introducer was fully
disclosed to the DHSC … so to connect her and suggest she must repay money
simply because she is married to Mr Barrowman is both unfair and disingenuous
and shows that you have a personal/public agenda against her.”
In the
new statement sent on Friday evening, Barrowman’s spokesperson said: “The
consortium partners of PPE Medpro are prepared to enter into a dialogue with
the administrators of the company to discuss a possible settlement with the
government.”
PPE
Medpro is now bust – put into administration by Perree Ptc, a private trust
company linked to Barrowman registered in the British Virgin Islands tax haven,
which had a mortgage-style charge against the company. Barrowman’s spokesperson
did not respond to questions about Perree, or the circumstances in which it had
put the company into administration.
The whole
legal basis for limited companies is to protect the people who have put money
in from becoming personally liable for all its debts: to give the owners
limited liability. If Barrowman, who described himself in the 2023 BBC
interview as the ultimate beneficial owner of PPE Medpro, and who received £65m
in profits, does not wish to pay the DHSC, the legal routes to enforcing the
judgment appear difficult.
There are
only narrow circumstances in which an administrator or somebody owed money, the
government in this case, can get behind a company’s limited liability – “pierce
the corporate veil” in legal terminology – and enforce payment from directors
or shareholders.
“There is
no obvious, easy route to recover money from any individuals behind the company
in this case,” Simon Walsh, a commercial litigation partner at SA Law, said.
“The circumstances for piercing the corporate veil can include where an
administrator proves that transactions have been improper, or fraudulent. This
may not apply here and investigating it will inevitably be costly, complex and
time-consuming. There is a real risk of a pyrrhic victory for the government in
this case.”
It
appears that any process for seeking repayment of the £122m is separate to the
long-running investigation by the National Crime Agency into PPE Medpro and
whether Mone and Barrowman may have committed criminal offences, including
fraud by false representation, in the procurement of the contracts. The couple
deny any criminal wrongdoing.
The NCA
has confirmed that it began its investigation in May 2021, and in April the
following year law enforcement officers raided the couple’s mansion on the Isle
of Man and their London home, as well as the PPE Medpro offices. In December
2023, Mone and Barrowman agreed to a freezing order of more than £75m worth of
assets, including bank accounts, wealth management accounts and shares held in
companies owning luxury properties, after an application by the Crown
Prosecution Service under the Proceeds of Crime Act.
The NCA
has not provided any detailed information about the time it is taking or when
the CPS might decide whether there will be any criminal charges. PPE Medpro’s
barrister, Charles Samek KC, complained during the high court trial that the
NCA investigation was “long-running and seemingly never-ending”, and “hanging …
like Damocles’ sword” over the company “without ever seemingly being
progressed”.
In
response to questions about how long it was taking, the NCA has said in a
statement: “Investigations must pursue all reasonable lines of inquiry. In
serious economic crime investigations these lines of inquiry can be incredibly
complex. It can take considerable time to ensure that a thorough, independent
and objective investigation is conducted.”
Reeves
has insisted the government is determined to recover money lost in failed
pandemic spending, pointing to the establishment of the Covid counter-fraud
commissioner among other initiatives. In the PPE Medpro case, however, it risks
having spent more millions for an expert legal team led by Paul Stanley KC to
win a hard-fought £122m judgment it cannot enforce. Government sources have not
provided any information about what it might do if the money is not paid on
Wednesday.
The DHSC
has declined to expand on the comments of the health secretary, Wes Streeting,
who said on the day of the judgment: “PPE Medpro must now repay the government
and the taxpayer £122m. My department will work closely with PPE Medpro
Limited’s administrators to recover everything we can.”
Daniel
Bruce, the chief executive of Transparency International UK, a key member of
the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition which was a core participant in the Covid
public inquiry into the pandemic contracts debacle, said: “There appear to be
very few levers the government has available to recover anything close to the
£122m the high court has ordered PPE Medpro to repay. The whole case stands as
a further indictment of the ‘VIP lane’ and the flawed, wasteful procurement of
PPE during the pandemic.”
This saga
of the Conservative peer, her businessman husband, Johnson’s Tory government
and the multimillion-pound Covid contracts has some way to run yet.
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