Baroness Michelle Mone’s husband has hit out on the authorities and mentioned his household has been “treated as a punchbag” in a row over private protecting tools (PPE) procurement through the pandemic.
Doug Barrowman blasted “lamentable failures” by ministers in procuring PPE through the early days of the pandemic, and added that “it suits the agenda of the government and their media spin doctors to scapegoat my wife and I”.
It comes after Baroness Mone admitted she lied when she denied having hyperlinks to the agency PPE Medpro, a consortium led by Mr Barrowman, which was awarded contracts value greater than £200 million to provide robes and face masks.
She additionally conceded in an interview final month that she and her household stand to learn from the £60m in earnings made by the corporate, positioned right into a belief by her husband.
In the assertion of greater than 1,000 phrases printed early on New Year’s Day on X, Mr Barrowman mentioned he and his household have been “treated as a punchbag by the media for the past three years” and have “received death threats and a constant torrent of online and other abuse”.
He tried to maneuver the talk in the direction of what he classed as failures by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), saying: “Michelle and I are being hung out to dry to distract attention from government incompetence in how it handled PPE procurement at time of national emergency.”
He added: “Medpro supplied the government with 1.5% of PPE spend (£202m) against a total of £13.1bn and yet the media or government refuses to focus on the other 98.5% of PPE supplied; much of which was defective or never used and/or supplied in identical circumstances to the Medpro contracts.”
Mr Barrowman additionally hit out on the COVID inquiry, saying it’s “simply unacceptable” that it isn’t set to look at PPE procurement till 2025, which might be after a common election.
He mentioned: “The stark actuality is that DHSC has introduced this declare towards Medpro at a time of elevated scrutiny of the way it overspent by a lot and when questions had been being requested as to why the federal government was writing off £9 billion of PPE out of the £13.1 billion spent.
“How on earth did the UK government manage to purchase five years of PPE when it was only supposed to build up four months of stock?
“Yet nobody has been held accountable at DHSC. Its head, Sir Chris Wormald [permanent secretary to the DHSC] ought to resign, since finally he signed off all of the PPE contracts.”
The authorities launched civil authorized proceedings towards PPE Medpro final December over the deal, and the agency is vigorously defending itself.
It can also be dealing with a National Crime Agency (NCA) investigation into suspected legal offences within the contracts for PPE procurement – however Mr Barrowman accused ministers of “using the arm of the NCA to threaten criminal proceedings unless we settle” the civil case.
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He additionally mentioned it was “curious” that “out of 176 disputed contracts to a value of £2.7bn, no one else, other than Medpro is being litigated against”, and added the agency is “confident of success” within the authorized combat.
A DHSC spokesman mentioned: “We do not comment on ongoing legal cases.”
Prime Minister Rishi Sunak mentioned final month that he and the federal government “take all these things incredibly seriously”, however refused to remark extra particularly because of the ongoing authorized motion.
Labour chief Sir Keir Starmer has referred to as for Baroness Mone to be expelled from the House of Lords following the admission she lied over her hyperlinks to Medpro.
Source: information.sky.com”