TetleysTLDR
03 Aug
Grand Theft Healthcare

TetleysTLDR: The summary

Michelle Mone, a Tory peer, personally lobbied for her husband's company, PPE Medpro, to receive £203 million in COVID contracts. The company supplied unusable gowns to the NHS.  Mone lied about her involvement and secretly received £29 million via offshore accounts.  The UK government is now suing to recover £122 million.  This was not an isolated incident, it was part of a wider pattern of corruption enabled by the government’s 'VIP lane' which favoured companies connected to ministers and Tory donors.  The Tories, never ones to let a good crisis go to waste.  At least £15 billion of COVID spending was wasted, with £1 billion spent on unusable PPE from the VIP lane alone.  Other profiteers include Tory donors and insiders like Andrew Mills, David Meller, and Lord Chadlington: none of whom have faced prosecution.  Meanwhile, NHS workers died due to lack of proper equipment. The National Crime Agency has been investigating since 2022.  No charges have been filed.  Not one VIP lane profiteer has spent a night in jail.

Mone should be stripped of her peerage, prosecuted for fraud, and have all illicit profits seized. The same applies to all those involved in the VIP lane scandal. This is not just corruption, it’s criminal, and justice demands accountability.

TetleysTLDR: The Report

While the nation mourned its dead, Michelle Mone and her husband were busy getting rich.  Not by chance.  Not by effort.  But by exploiting a national emergency, using political connections to funnel hundreds of millions in public money into offshore accounts and then lying about it for years.  This wasn’t just sleaze.  This was industrial-scale profiteering in the middle of a mass-death event while frontline workers died, were left with bin bags for PPE and had to break into flu kits for hand sanitiser.

It isn’t enough to remove Baroness Michelle Mone from the House of Lords. After what she's done that’s the least we should expect.  Mone should be in the dock. She should be facing fraud charges.  She should be staring down the possibility of prison.  Because what she and her husband did during the COVID crisis wasn’t just corrupt,  it was an obscenity. A direct, calculated looting of the public purse while the country mourned its dead.  And they weren’t alone.  This wasn’t one rogue baroness.  This was systemic.  This was state-enabled profiteering on a scale not seen since the East India Company.  And we are still counting the costs in billions wasted, in public trust shattered, and in lives unnecessarily lost.  

In the chaos of the early pandemic, Michelle Mone personally lobbied ministers to secure her husband’s firm, PPE Medpro, two contracts worth £203 million. The company, which had never supplied medical equipment before, delivered tens of millions of gowns that could not be used.  The gowns failed basic sterility tests.  The NHS never touched them. Over £122 million was paid regardless. 

Where did the money go?  Well, £65 million was funnelled out of the UK through offshore accounts.  Of that, £29 million ended up in a trust set up for Michelle Mone and her children.  For two years, she lied about her involvement.  She told the press she had no connection.  She smeared journalists.  She even took legal action against those questioning her story. And all the while, she was sitting in the House of Lords, shaping national policy.  Only when the documents leaked did she finally admit the truth: yes, she was involved. Yes, she benefited. And no, she had no regrets. 

Of course Mone is not the exception, she is the most visible symptom of a much deeper disease. The VIP Lane Was a Corruption Conveyor Belt According to the National Audit Office, politically-connected companies were 10 times more likely to receive contracts through the so-called 'VIP Lane' than those who weren’t.  This backdoor system was set up by ministers to fast-track firms recommended by MPs, peers, and party donors and it functioned as a private club for pandemic profiteers.  While NHS staff wore bin bags, reused masks, and risked their lives without adequate protection, the government channelled billions in taxpayer money to its mates, donors, and shell companies. Contracts were handed out like party favours. Scrutiny was suspended.  Accountability vanished. The results?  £15 billion in pandemic spending has now been written off by the Department of Health as wasted or lost.

  • At least £1 billion went to unusable PPE from the VIP Lane alone.
  • Public confidence in government integrity has collapsed and no one has been jailed. 

The people shouting that we need to stop criminals on boats should probably start with this one. 

Let that sink in. We spent more on unusable PPE than the annual budget of some NHS trusts. And yet not a single high-level figure, not Mone, not her husband, not the ministers who facilitated this has been prosecuted.  The Criminals Wear Suits.

So let’s talk about who else belongs in the dock.  

  • Andrew Mills, government adviser and key figure behind Ayanda Capital, brokered a £252 million PPE deal, including tens of millions of masks unusable in the NHS. The firm had no background in medical equipment.
  • David Meller, major Tory donor and mate of Michael Gove, secured £164 million in contracts for his beauty products company, Meller Designs.
  • Lord Chadlington, a former Tory chairman, helped funnel £50 million to a firm that also supplied dud PPE. 

The Conservative Party raking it in:  Never ones to let a good crisis go to waste

The Government allowed this in plain sight.  Without due diligence, without any clawback clauses and with nice 'donations' to the Tory Party.  Back in November 2021 the Good Law Project highlighted this.  https://goodlawproject.org/conservative-politicians-vip-lane/ 

The British Medical Journal, one of the most globally respected publications reported in 2024 that £10billion was wasted on dodgy PPE.  It's doubtful we'll ever know the full amount.  https://www.bmj.com/content/384/bmj.q227

Meanwhile the National Audit Office investigation in 2022 showed just how blatent and rife this abuse of procurement safeguards in order to funnel contracts to Tory donors was. https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/foi-1700.pdf

The government is now trying to claw back £24 million from that deal.  Good luck with that.  These people weren’t just lucky opportunists. They were insiders. They were let in the back door while the rest of the country stood outside clapping for carers.  They made millions while nurses died.  And every step of the way, they were protected by a government that normalised grift under the banner of emergency. That shielded wrongdoing with non-disclosure agreements. That redacted reports and delayed the COVID Inquiry for as long as possible. That has still not launched a single criminal prosecution for this systemic fraud.  

in Britain, if you defraud the benefits system for £500, you get a court summons but if you defraud the NHS for £200 million, you get a knighthood or a peerage and a seat on a yacht in Monaco.

This Wasn’t Just Corruption: it Was Necropolitics - The dead can’t sue.  The grieving can’t invoice the state for their pain.  And that’s what made this grift so grotesquely efficient. These people trampled over the corpses of the pandemic dead. They saw crisis not as a challenge to rise to, but as an opportunity to exploit. They made obscene profits while people suffocated in corridors.  They went shopping for yachts while you went shopping for toilet paper in a stripped-bare Tesco.  Mone and Barrowman bought luxury mansions, jets, jewellery, and moved their empire offshore, out of reach of any meaningful accountability.  And they’re still fighting the government in court, even now, to keep the money. 

Meanwhile, the families of NHS workers who died for lack of proper PPE are still waiting for truth, justice, and compensation.  Where’s the Justice?  The National Crime Agency has been 'investigating' this since 2022.  That’s three years.  In that time, the police have arrested Just Stop Oil campaigners for slow marching, activists for throwing paint, pensioners under Terrorism laws, Holocaust survivors for antisemitism and peaceful protestors for carrying signs.  Yet despite a mountain of evidence not one person involved in this industrial-scale fraud has spent a night in a cell.  Why?  Because in Britain, if you defraud the benefits system for £500, you get a court summons but if you defraud the NHS for £200 million, you get a knighthood or a peerage and a seat on a yacht in Monaco. And it fucking stinks.

At least 850 healthcare workers died in the line of duty during COVID.  Some bastards just used it as an excuse to funnel public money into their greasy paws. 

This is not just a scandal. This is a crime scene. And before the cap doffing pearl clutchers start crying 'trickle-down' and 'wealth enablers', the people who orchestrated it are not heroes or celebrities. They are not 'entrepreneurs', they are white-collar criminals. They deserve to be prosecuted.  They deserve to be jailed.  And they deserve to be remembered as the parasites who turned a public health crisis into a get-rich-quick scheme for the elite. 

Strip the Titles. Freeze the Assets. File the Charges.  If the UK still pretends to be a democracy governed by the rule of law, we must act:

  • Michelle Mone should be stripped of her peerage immediately: not suspended, not investigated further, not 'allowed to step back'. Removed.
  • The CPS must bring charges of fraud, corruption, and conspiracy against all those involved, including ministers who enabled this theft.
  • Assets gained through these contracts must be frozen and confiscated, and the funds returned to the NHS.

And the VIP Lane itself must be declared what it was: unlawful, unethical, and criminal. The COVID dead can’t speak. But we can. And we must. Because if we don’t demand justice now, this will happen again. 

If you believe justice means more than a slap on the wrist, support the campaign to prosecute Michelle Mone and dismantle the corrupt system that made her rich. No more VIP lanes. No more pandemic profiteers. No more impunity.

https://act.38degrees.org.uk/act/expel-michelle-mone-lords-petition?utm_source=email



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