Ben KingBusiness reporter
A company linked to Baroness Mone and her husband Doug Barrowman passed most of the money it received from the government for personal protective equipment (PPE) to other firms, according to a spokesperson for Mr Barrowman.
On Wednesday a judge ordered PPE Medpro to repay £122m as the gowns it supplied did not meet sterility certification standards.
However, £83m of that was paid to other companies and there was a “very strong case” for the administrator to chase them for the money, the spokesperson said.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said his department would seek to “recover everything we can”.
When Mr Barrowman spoke to the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in 2023, he said PPE Medpro was set up as a consortium with companies called Loudwater Trade and Finance and Eric Beare Associates.
In that interview, Mr Barrowman said: “The British government would have preferred to always trade with a UK company, so we created PPE Medpro as a UK business, so that the three partners could provide PPE to the British government.”
Baroness Mone, a Conservative peer at the time, used her contacts to enter the company into the “VIP lane” to get preferential access to government contracts.
Mr Barrowman’s spokesperson claimed that the company itself did not undertake the technical work of liaising with manufacturers in China, including quality control and sterility assurance levels.
The other parties distanced themselves from PPE Medpro once the government began legal action, and only communicated through lawyers, the spokesperson said.
A High Court judgement on Wednesday ordered PPE Medpro to repay £122m to the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC), having ruled that the gowns the company supplied did not meet sterility certification standards.
The day before, the directors of PPE Medpro started the process of putting the company into administration. Administrators will seek to wind the company up and try to recover as much money as possible for creditors.
However, the company only has £666,000 of assets, so it is unlikely to be able to repay the DHSC in full.
The government has said it will work closely with the administrators.
Despite Baroness Mone not being a shareholder or director of the company, some politicians have called on her to repay the money personally.
The spokesperson for Mr Barrowman said: “It seems incredibly unfair that all the attention has focused on Doug Barrowman when there was a consortium.
“There is a very strong case for the administrator [of PPE Medpro] to chase the other consortium members whose companies received huge funds.”
However, Mr Barrowman has admitted receiving a large share of the proceeds himself.
In his 2023 interview, he told the BBC he had received around £60m from PPE Medpro.
Baroness Mone said that a share of that sum was paid into a trust in the Isle of Man, of which she and her children are beneficiaries, and so potentially stand to receive the money.
Loudwater’s parent company, Loudwater Holdings Ltd, is based in North London. It had net assets of more than £55m, according to its latest accounts, and a turnover of £95m.
The National Crime Agency is investigating the PPE Medpro case. It declined to comment on whether it was also looking into the other members of the consortium.
Loudwater declined to comment. Eric Beare Associates did not respond to requests for comment.
The DHSC did not say whether it would pursue other members of the consortium.
NOTE: An earlier version of this story attributed the quotations to a spokesperson for PPE Medpro. They later requested to be described as a spokesperson for Mr Barrowman.
