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.
Some excerpts from the article:
She told the BBC her life had been “destroyed” by allegations about their PPE profits, even though “we’ve only done one thing, which was lie to the press to say we weren’t involved”.
She said that was “not a crime” and added: “No-one deserves this.”
But a defiant Baroness Mone said: “I don’t honestly see there is a case to answer. I can’t see what we have done wrong.”
Mr Barrowman said that Baroness Mone “was always going to benefit, and my family will benefit in due course… her family benefit, my family benefit”.
“That’s what you do when you are in a privileged position of making money,” he said.
People fucking well died - a lot of them alone and frightened because they couldn’t have friends or family with them. There is no punishment severe enough for this shit show.
That’s an astoundingly tone-deaf interview that is up there with Prince Andrew’s Newsnight one.
Tone-deaf is a nice way of saying sociopathic in this instance.
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Mone replied: “Saying to the press, ‘I’m not involved’, to protect my family, can I just make this clear, it’s not a crime … I was protecting my family.”
If she had done nothing wrong then what was she protecting her family from?
I can’t wait for Keir Starmer to get in and open up a criminal case against these two. Let’s get our money back from this trust they’ve funneled it into.
But they didn’t do nuthink wrong
why is she not lying now after admitting lying to investigators for years?
should be in prison. why is she even allowed to defend herself on tv? bizarre
Oh my goodness. I just read her Wikipedia article, and she appears to be the worst sort of racist, low-life chancer, somehow elevated to the House of Lords.
The worst, so far ;)
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.
The original article contains 461 words, the summary contains 203 words. Saved 56%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This story gets more and more incredulous by the minute…
