Michelle Mone has accused the government of making her and her husband a “poster couple for the PPE scandal” and claimed it had turned down multi-million-pound offers to settle a High Court legal battle with a company she is linked with.
PPE Medpro, a consortium led by the Tory peer’s husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, is being sued by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) over allegations it breached a contract for 25 million surgical gowns during the coronavirus pandemic.
Lawyers for the government told a trial earlier this year that it was entitled to recover the £121 million cost of the contract, which the company opposes.
Mrs Justice Cockerill will rule on the case on Wednesday, while court records showed that PPE Medpro filed a “notice of appointment to appoint an administrator” on Tuesday.
In a post on X on Tuesday, Baroness Mone claimed the case “was never about gowns or money” and said that before the trial, PPE Medpro offered to replace the gowns and then offered a cash sum to settle the case during the trial, which was rejected.
She said: “Instead, the DHSC chose to spend a staggering £5 million of taxpayers’ money pursuing litigation against a company they knew had no funds.”
She continued that she and Mr Barrowman had “worked tirelessly with the DHSC to resolve this dispute”, and that PPE Medpro had “fulfilled its contracts”.
She said: “This case was never about gowns or money. It has always been about politics and blame-shifting, a way to cover up the government’s disastrous £10 billion PPE write-off.
“Doug and I have been deliberately scapegoated and vilified in an orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement.
“The government decided to make us the poster couple for the PPE scandal, a convenient distraction to take the blame off them.”
She added: “PPE Medpro delivered products manufactured to internationally recognised standards, yet many other suppliers who ran off with deposits or provided defective goods face no action.
“Singling out one company in this way is not justice; it is scapegoating.”
In one letter posted by Baroness Mone on X, sent by PPE Medpro to the government Legal Department, the company said the High Court case was a “clear case of buyer’s remorse, long after the event”.
It continued that an original settlement offer “was made in good faith, not as a sign of weakness but as a way of getting both sides out of a difficult PR optic”, adding that it was “prepared to give you a win”.
It also said that if a second offer to settle the case “once and for all” was rejected, it “looks forward to pulling apart” the DHSC’s “ludicrous” case in the remainder of the trial.
At Labour’s party conference on Tuesday, Rachel Reeves joked that the government did have a vendetta against Baroness Michelle Mone.
The Chancellor told a fringe event at Labour’s party conference: “Michelle Mone, remember her, she’s come out today and said that the government has got a vendetta against her.
“Too right we do.”
In court documents filed in May, the DHSC said it paid PPE Medpro £121,999,219.20 in the summer of 2020 for the gowns and rejected them in December that year.
Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, told the trial in London earlier this year that PPE Medpro breached the contract for the gowns as they were “faulty” due to not being sterile.
He said it should be allowed to recoup the costs of the contract as a result, as well as those of transporting and storing the items, which amount to an additional £8,648,691.
Barristers for the firm told the trial that it had been “singled out for unfair treatment” and accused the Government of “buyer’s remorse”, claiming that the gowns became defective due to the conditions they were kept in after being delivered to the DHSC.
Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, told the trial in written submissions that the Government had ordered 10 years’ worth of excess gowns by December 2020, which meant the gowns were “no longer needed or wanted”.
He said the company had “perhaps been singled out” due to those associated with it, adding that the sterility claim was “without real substance” and “is in truth no more than opportunistic”.
