UK Government made us scapegoats, claims Mone

TORY peer Michelle Mone has accused the UK 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.

- CALLUM PARKE and DANNY HALPIN

PPE Medpro, a consortium led by Baroness Mone’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 UK Government told a trial earlier this year that it was entitled to recover the £121m cost of the contract, which the company opposes.

Mrs Justice Cockerill will rule on the case today, while court records showed that PPE Medpro filed a “notice of appointment to appoint an administrator” yesterday.

In a post on X yesterday, 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 £5m of taxpayers’ money pursuing litigation against a company they knew had no funds.”