Saturday 14 May 2022 01:55 AM Baroness Bra Michelle Mone, the £200m PPE deal and the denials that don't add ... trends now

Lady (Michelle) Mone OBE, as she styles herself on social media, lives in a vast U-shaped manor house on the Isle of Man which her estate agent recently described as ‘possibly one of the finest homes in the British Isles’.

The nine-bed pile boasts a games room, bar, home cinema, air-conditioned library, plus a ‘pool and spa complex which features two treatment rooms, a relaxing spa lounge, sauna, steam room, Jacuzzi, plunge pool, tropical spa, male and female changing rooms, tanning studio and state-of-the-art gym’.

Outside are 154 acres of gardens and grounds, taking in a tennis court, helipad and ‘amphitheatre’, plus a long carriage drive ending next to a bronze fountain where the 50-year-old Tory peer once posed for Hello! magazine with second husband Doug Barrowman, a billionaire six years her senior, next to a red Ferrari.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 27, a very different selection of vehicles could be seen crunching down the gravel leading to the Glasgow-born entrepreneur’s residence. It was a convoy of police cars, coming as part of an operation to execute simultaneous search warrants on four properties on the Isle of Man, plus another two in London, in raids that the local constabulary described as being ‘in support of’ an ongoing fraud investigation by the National Crime Agency (NCA).

All six addresses have links to either Lady Mone — who was reportedly present at the house — or her husband. One is a Belgravia home she uses as her London base, while another is a Soho office to which several of their companies are registered.

A third is Knox House, an imposing office in the tax haven’s usually sleepy capital Douglas from which the couple conduct business.

Witnesses saw a dozen police cars, park along the street at breakfast time. Plain-clothes officers, wearing armoured vests, then gathered in a huddle before swooping on both the front and rear doors. Detectives are understood to have seized documents, computers, electronic equipment and mobile phones. No arrests were made, but it was reported that Lady Mone is likely to be interviewed about their contents.

It marks a dramatic escalation in a controversy that has dogged her existence for 18 months, so far spawning not just a wide-ranging NCA probe but an official inquiry by the House of Lords Commissioners for Standards. At stake are tens of millions of pounds, along with the jealously guarded reputation of this famously sharp-elbowed businesswoman, who once rarely missed a chance to wax lyrical about her soap-opera life’s remarkable trajectory but is now refusing to comment on developments, beyond maintaining that she has done nothing wrong.

Nicknamed ‘Baroness Bra’ after making her fortune in the lingerie trade, she famously used her maiden speech in Parliament, having been ennobled by David Cameron, to remind her ermine-clad colleagues: ‘I grew up in a tenement flat in the east end of Glasgow with no bath or shower and only a cupboard for a bedroom.’

Recent events have, however, seen her disappear from view. Lady Mone’s Instagram and Twitter accounts, on which she once posted near-daily motivational messages and pearls of wisdom, along with pictures of herself on yachts and beaches and in a variety of luxury properties, have been eerily silent since early January.

She last uttered a word in the Lords in March 2020 and has turned up to vote on just eight days in the past year. Her only public statements have been issued in writing by an aggressive law firm seeking — with, it must be said, mixed success — to curtail news coverage of her woes.

This unfortunate fall from grace revolves around Lady Mone’s purported links to a company named PPE Medpro, which at the height of the first Covid lockdown in June 2020 won two contracts worth more than £200 million to supply protective equipment to the UK Government, without any competitive tender.

One was for £81 million worth of face masks. The other saw the firm paid £122 million to supply 25 million sterilised gowns to the NHS.

With a global shortage of PPE, prices had soared, meaning vast amounts of money could be made by companies able to source it. The gowns were, for example, manufactured in China for £46 million, or just over a third of the price the UK Government was offering.

But the deal later turned sour amid a disagreement over whether the products were fit for purpose.

Specifically, when the sterilised gowns arrived, the NHS carried out a quality inspection. It was swiftly decided that the gowns were unsuitable for use. It then began trying to recover the tens of millions in public money that it had already paid the company.

PPE Medpro insists the products were delivered ‘fully in accordance with the agreed contract’ and refused to play ball. Both sides are currently in mediation.

So far, so questionable. But what would elevate this commercial dispute into a major political scandal were revelations about the role Lady Mone played in setting up the ill-fated transaction.

It emerged that PPE Medpro had been founded by a man named Anthony Page, on May 12, 2020, just a month before it won the huge contract. Mr Page, who had no obvious prior experience in the medical supplies industry, was a director of Knox Group, a finance firm owned by Mr Barrowman that helps ‘ultra-high-net-worth individuals’ look after their loot.

Intriguingly, he had also been a director of MGM Media, a company belonging to Lady Mone that manages her ‘brand’, quitting the business on the day that PPE Medpro was founded. He was also a director of LM Yachts, a business that owns a £5 million luxury yacht named Lady M that she sailed around the coast of Croatia in August that year. Furthermore, PPE Medpro and several of Lady Mone’s firms — including a design company called Michelle Mone Interiors Unlimited and a flexible office business, Neospace — turned out to have been registered to exactly the same London address.

Asked what was going on, the Tory peer instructed lawyers to insist she had nothing whatsoever to do with the troubled PPE firm.

‘Baroness Mone has no comment as she has no role or involvement in PPE Medpro,’ they claimed, adding during a six-week correspondence with the Guardian that she was ‘not connected in any way with PPE Medpro’ and that ‘any suggestion of an association’ would be ‘both inaccurate and misleading’.