The former Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, have acknowledged for the first time that he made multimillion pound profits from two PPE deals during the Covid pandemic.
Mone also acknowledged for the first time that, as revealed by the Guardian last year, Barrowman then transferred money from those profits to a trust, the Keristal Trust, set up for the benefit of Mone and her three adult children. The couple said Barrowman’s children were also beneficiaries of the trust.
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, Mone and Barrowman both also admitted they lied to the media for years when they denied they were involved with the company awarded the contracts, PPE Medpro Ltd.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The former Conservative peer Michelle Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, have acknowledged for the first time that he made multimillion pound profits from two PPE deals during the Covid pandemic.
In an interview with the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg on Sunday, Mone and Barrowman both also admitted they lied to the media for years when they denied they were involved with the company awarded the contracts, PPE Medpro Ltd.
Mone told Kuenssberg that she had lied to the media because she wanted to protect her family from press attention, not as a “smokescreen” to hide her involvement.
In November 2022, the Guardian revealed that leaked documents produced by HSBC bank indicated that Barrowman was an investor in PPE Medpro, and that he was paid at least £65m from its profits.
In a film uploaded to YouTube last week paid for by PPE Medpro, its presenter, Mark Williams-Thomas, said the couple were facing criminal allegations of conspiracy to defraud, fraud by false representation, and bribery, as part of a long-running investigation by the National Crime Agency into the PPE Medpro contracts.
The government is also suing for the return of the £122m it paid for the surgical gowns, alleging they were unsafe to use.
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