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PPE Medpro has been ordered to repay £122mn to the government after the High Court in London found that the medical supplier linked to Conservative peer Baroness Michelle Mone provided substandard equipment during the Covid-19 pandemic.
In a judgment on Wednesday, Mrs Justice Sara Cockerill found that gowns supplied by the company for NHS use had failed to meet required sterility standards, breaching a UK government contract that it won in 2020.
She gave PPE Medpro, which Mone recommended for state contracts at the height of the health crisis, until 4pm on October 15 to repay the £122mn sum that the Department of Health and Social Care paid for the gowns.
But it was not immediately clear on Wednesday how the government would be able to recoup the funds.
A notice to appoint an administrator to PPE Medpro, owned by a consortium led by Mone’s husband Doug Barrowman, was filed this week ahead of the judgment. The latest accounts filed at Companies House, the UK corporate registry, showed the company had net assets of £666,000.
The government sued PPE Medpro for breach of contract in 2022 and this year the case went to trial, during which the company denied the claims against it.
PPE Medpro won its contract during the pandemic via the then Conservative government’s contentious “VIP lane”, which fast-tracked potential equipment suppliers with links to politicians or government officials.
Mone, a lingerie entrepreneur who was ennobled by then Tory prime minister Lord David Cameron in 2015, lobbied ministers during the pandemic to give the lucrative contracts to PPE Medpro. It went on to supply equipment including 25mn gowns.
In 2023, Mone admitted that she stood to gain from profits of about £60mn that the company made from its government contracts.
In a statement on Wednesday, a spokesperson for Barrowman described the ruling as a “travesty of justice”.
Cockerill’s “judgment bears little resemblance to what actually took place during the month-long trial, where PPE Medpro convincingly demonstrated that its gowns were sterile”, the spokesperson said. “This judgment is a whitewash of the facts.”
On Tuesday, Mone said in a post on X that the government had rejected several offers to settle the case and instead pursued litigation “against a company they knew had no funds”.
The DHSC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
During the trial, the government alleged that PPE Medpro gave invalid information about the health and safety of the protective equipment it provided for use by medical staff during the pandemic.
In a summary of her 87-page judgment on Wednesday, Cockerill said the gowns failed to comply with the relevant sterility standard. “The failure to show a validated process . . . meant that this requirement was breached,” she said.
The government can “recover the full value of the gowns as damages”, although an additional £8.6mn claim it made for the costs of storing the gowns failed due to lack of evidence, Cockerill said.
The judge added that the “CE mark” stamped on the delivery of medical gowns — which certifies that a product has been tested by an accredited body — failed to meet the required standard.
Additional reporting by Anna Gross in London
