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Case Update

Our PPE procurement case is going to the Supreme Court

11th November 2022

We have just heard that the Supreme Court has given us permission for our appeal to be heard in regards to the service error made by external solicitors in one of our cases. The case relates to £100m+ worth of public contracts and evidence that Ministers and an ex-adviser to the Prime Minister actively helped favoured bidders to win the contracts.

Due to a mistake in serving the claim form, our case about the award of contracts to Pharmaceuticals Direct Limited has not been able to proceed.

Our external solicitors emailed the claim form that commences proceedings directly to the Government lawyers working on the case, as they had been asked to do, but failed to send it to a generic “new proceedings” email address by way of formal “service”, as had also been requested. The Government’s lawyers confirmed receipt of the papers almost immediately after receiving them but did not flag that the “new proceedings” email had not been copied until one day after the deadline for service.

This mistake had no practical consequences for the Government’s ability to prepare a defence, since their solicitors were aware of the claim well before the deadline. However, two of the Court of Appeal judges hearing the case found that the error should nonetheless prevent the claim from being pursued.

The dissenting Judge in the Court of Appeal disagreed, observing that the mistake “did not have (and was never likely to have) any practical consequences whatsoever” and:

“If service is not to be validated retrospectively in such circumstances, form really has triumphed over substance and litigation has become a game of forfeits: the overriding objective, to deal with cases justly, has itself been overridden.”

We are grateful to the Supreme Court for granting permission for our appeal to proceed, and remain hopeful that a different decision will be reached so that we can pursue this important claim.

Decisions like this have real consequences. We believe a company with connections to Ministers was paid almost double the going rate for facemasks, even though Government had been offered cheaper alternatives. If the claim can’t be heard, the public may never find out why.


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Case

This article is part of our £100m+ Contract for Ex-Number 10 Adviser case

A firm linked to Samir Jassal, a two-time Conservative Party parliamentary candidate and former councillor, was awarded a £102.6 million Government PPE contract without any competition in July last year. It was only after our lawyers wrote to Government in March this year to ask about Pharmaceuticals Direct that this contract was disclosed, long after Boris Johnson had insisted all contract details were on record.

See more about this case