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Latest 1 October 2025
PPE Medpro must repay £122m for breach of contract
PA Images / Alamy
The company Michelle Mone landed on the Tories’ unlawful VIP lane has 14 days to repay £122m for gowns supplied during the pandemic and never used.
PPE Medpro must repay £122m for breaching a contract to supply gowns to the NHS during the Covid pandemic, a High Court judge has ruled.
The company had been set up just seven weeks before the contract was signed, and had only £100 to its name. But, after Baroness Michelle Mone referred the company to fellow Tory peer health minister Lord Agnew, PPE Medpro bagged two contracts worth over £200m to supply PPE to the NHS – which we were the first to reveal in October 2020.
The gowns supplied by the firm for £122m weren’t properly sterilised, which the government argued in court meant that they could “seriously harm or kill patients”, so they were never used.
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Mone repeatedly denied that she or her husband, crypto businessman Doug Barrowman, had any financial interest in PPE Medpro and the inflated contract that the taxpayers had entered into at her recommendation. But in 2023 Mone and Barrowman finally acknowledged their role in securing the contracts, as well as that they stood to benefit from £60m of PPE Medpro’s profit.
The health department sued the company for the £122m wasted on unusable gowns. Today’s ruling confirms this breach of contract and gives the firm 14 days to repay the amount in full, leaving the company, which appointed administrators yesterday, scrambling for cash.
Mone didn’t show up in court and remains unrepentant, with PPE Medpro claiming the judgment was “an establishment win” that flew in the face of a “mountain of evidence”. But according to Good Law Project’s executive director, Jo Maugham, this judgment should only be the start.
“The people of the UK made incredible sacrifices during the Covid pandemic,” Maugham said, “upturning their lives, staying away from their family, acting with a sense of duty towards their loved ones and strangers. Meanwhile, in Whitehall, Tory ministers were finding ways to enrich their chums.”
“I’m pleased to see that, after five years and a change in government, some people involved in this national scandal are starting to face consequences. But we cannot claim to have moved on from the venal political culture that brought us the VIP lane until the ministers involved face consequences too.”