By Nick Sommerlad

Copyright mirror

A notorious PPE company linked to Baroness Mone is being put into administration while awaiting judgement in a £134m court case. An application to appoint administrators to PPE Medpro was lodged this morning at the High Court, the Mirror can reveal. It is unclear who is behind the move but one of the applicants is an Isle of Man company managed by a former director of PPE Medpro. It comes after the Mirror revealed that PPE Medpro has just £666,000 left in assets after spending £4.3m defending itself in the High Court against the claim for damages over gowns that were allegedly unusable in the NHS . The judgement in the case between the Department of Health and PPE Medpro is due to be given at the High Court tomorrow morning. In response to the latest development Tory peer Mone complained she and her husband Doug Barrowman have been made “scapegoats”. It is unclear, even if the Government were to win its £134m claim, whether any money would be recouped for the taxpayer. We were the first to reveal how PPE Medpro, set up by a close associate of Baroness Mone and her businessman husband Barrowman in the early weeks of the pandemic, won huge government contracts for PPE. Mone initially denied any involvement in the firm to the Mirror but it later emerged she and her husband had benefitted from £65m in profits from the company. The couple have been linked to assets including property, a jet and a yacht, worth more than £100m, though some have been frozen by the courts and others sold or advertised for sale. The Department of Health launched proceedings in the High Court in 2022 over claims that 25m gowns were unsuitable for use in the NHS after tests showed many were not sterile. Over four weeks of court hearings in July, PPE Medpro denied the claims, insisting the contamination must have happened in transit, and said the Department had “buyer’s remorse” after buying 10 years of stock. The judgement in the case is pending. But today an application was lodged in the High Court to appoint an administrator to PPE Medpro. The applicants include a number of insolvency specialists at two leading London firms – Forvis Mazars and Clarke Bell. But one applicant is a company called Angelo (PTC) Limited, an Isle of Man company registered last January and with links to Baroness Mone and Mr Barrowman. It is listed at Companies House as having two managing officers. One is Tim Eve, previously named as deputy chairman at Barrowman’s offshore Knox Group. The other is Voirrey Cooke, who was previously a director of PPE Medpro from 2020 to 2022. The latest accounts for PPE Medpro, for the 12 months to the end of July, show it had £541,000 worth of investments and was owed £1.2m. But after debts of £1.1m, the “net assets” were just £666,025, down from £2.1m a year previously. The accounts refer to the Department of Health’s court claim for £133,577,920.20 plus interest, but state that “the Company disputes the claim and served a defence and counterclaim” and that following legal advice it “believes that it has a sound defence to the claim”. It adds: “The company has used approximately £4.2 million of reserves to defend the DHSC [Department of Health and Social Care] claim. Since the balance sheet date further costs have been incurred in this respect which are being quantified and are expected to be in the order of £100 000.” No issues have been raised with the facemasks the Government paid nearly £81m for, but gowns costing £122m were rejected in December 2020. The National Crime Agency has launched a fraud investigation into PPE Medpro, which has seen the Tory peer and Mr Barrowman interviewed under caution by detectives. Their homes in London and the Isle of Man were raidedby detectives in April 2022. The pair are suspected of conspiracy to defraud, fraud by false representation and bribery but deny all the allegations and insist they have done nothing wrong. Baroness Mone is on a leave of absence from the House of Lords “in order to clear her name of the allegations that have been unjustly levelled against her.” Mone is facing a separate investigation by the Lords Commissioner for Standards into whether she breached the conduct rules by failing to register an interest in the company and by lobbying for it to be awarded government contracts. Baroness Mone rose to prominence as a businesswoman behind the Ultimo underwear brand and was made a peer by former Prime Minister David Cameron in 2015. She married Isle of Man-based entrepreneur Doug Barrowman in 2020. Around £75m of assets linked to Tory peer Baroness Mone and her tycoon husband have been frozen or restrained by court order. The court order obtained by the Financial Times covers a string of assets including a six-bedroom Belgravia townhouse, subsequently sold for £19m, a country estate on the Isle of Man and nine properties in Glasgow, owned through offshore companies. It also covers 15 accounts at upmarket banks Coutts, Hoares and Goldman Sachs. We revealed that Barrowman bought a £7m villa in the Algarve in 2022, though it has since been sold. And he owns a £41m villa on the Caribbean island of St Barts, which has been marketed for sale for several years. Also advertised for sale in recent years in the couple’s £7m yacht Lady M, owned through an Isle of Man company, and their £7.5m private jet. Documents filed at the Isle of Man Companies Registry state the Angelo (PTC) limited was established in 2023 and is owned by the Knox Foundation. The Knox Foundation was established on the Isle of Man in 2017 with council members including Anthony Page, another Barrowman associated, who was a director of PPE Medpro from 2020 until 2023. A government spokesperson said: “We cannot comment on active legal proceedings.” Posting on X today, Mone accused the Government of making her and her husband a “poster couple for the PPE scandal” and claimed that it turned down multi-million pound offers to settle the High Court legal battle. Baroness Mone claimed that the case “was never about gowns or money” and said that, before the trial, PPE Medpro offered to replace the gowns or provide a cash settlement, which was rejected, and that the case “has always been about politics and blame-shifting”. She said: “Instead, the DHSC chose to spend a staggering £5 million of taxpayers’ money pursuing litigation against a company they knew had no funds.” She continued: “Doug and I have been deliberately scapegoated and vilified in an orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement.” Paperwork posted by Baroness Mone on X today suggests that PPE Medpro made two offers to settle the court case earlier this year. The first in June was to offer to replace the 25m gowns in dispute with new sterile stock – or the cash equivalent. The second offer, in July, was an improved cash offer of £23m – but far less than the £134m the Government was seeking. The money would be made available by PPE Medpro’s “principal backer”, which was not named in the letter to the Government Legal Department. It added: “This is the last opportunity for the Government to recover any monies from our company.” A spokesperson for Forvis Mazars told the Mirror today: “Adam Harris and Michael Pallott of Forvis Mazars have been appointed Joint Administrators by the QFCH [Qualified Floating Charge Holder].” It is not clear who the charge holder is.