One Law for Them: When Stealing £122 Million Gets You Nothing But a Polite Request to Pay It Back

One Law for Them: The Chilling Double Standard of the Mone PPE Scandal

Imagine if you were ordered to pay back millions and you simply didn’t.

Actually, let’s make this more realistic. Imagine you owe your council £1,200 in council tax. You ignore the letters. You miss the deadline. What happens? Bailiffs at your door within weeks. County Court Judgement destroying your credit rating. Possibly prison if you can’t or won’t pay. The full weight of the state descends on you with terrifying speed and efficiency.

Now imagine you’re Baroness Michelle Mone. Imagine your company owes the taxpayer £122 million for supplying substandard PPE during a pandemic. Imagine a High Court judge has ruled against you, found that the gowns you sold weren’t even sterile as promised, and ordered you to pay back every penny plus £23.6 million in interest the total figure owed is around £145.6 million. So what happens when you miss the deadline to pay?

Absolutely nothing…

The company linked to Baroness Mone failed to meet Wednesday’s deadline to repay £122 million for breaching a Covid-19 PPE contract. The Department of Health and Social Care won a legal case earlier this month against PPE Medpro, a consortium led by Lady Mone’s husband Doug Barrowman, over claims the PPE did not comply with relevant healthcare standards. A High Court judge ruled some of the company’s gowns were not “sterile.” But when payment was due at 16:00 on Wednesday, nothing came.

The money is still sitting somewhere, probably offshore, whilst Health Secretary Wes Streeting issues stern statements about pursuing the company “with everything we’ve got.”

Here’s what makes this particularly obscene. PPE Medpro entered administration on 30 September, the day before the court judgement. The timing is not coincidental. This is a deliberate strategy, a legal manoeuvre designed to shield assets and delay consequences. It’s the kind of sophisticated financial engineering available only to those who can afford expensive lawyers and accountants. The working person facing bailiffs doesn’t get to enter administration. They get their belongings seized and their wages garnished.

Let us be clear about what happened here. During a national crisis, whilst healthcare workers were reusing masks and wearing bin bags as protective equipment, whilst people were dying in their thousands, Baroness Mone and her husband’s company secured a government contract worth hundreds of millions of pounds. They supplied gowns that weren’t sterile. Healthcare workers, treating Covid patients, wore gowns that didn’t meet basic safety standards. The risk they were exposed to, the potential infections that might have resulted, the sheer betrayal of trust, all so PPE Medpro could pocket taxpayers’ money.

Steal a little and they throw you in jail; steal a lot and they make you king

Bob Dylan

And the sums involved are staggering. The company now owes £145.6 million including interest, which continues to accrue at 8% per year. For context, that’s more than the entire annual budget of many NHS trusts. That money could have funded thousands of nurses, upgraded equipment in dozens of hospitals, provided care for vulnerable patients. Instead, it lined the pockets of a baroness and her businessman husband whilst healthcare workers risked their lives in faulty equipment.

Wes Streeting’s response, whilst appropriately outraged in tone, reveals the fundamental problem. “At a time of national crisis, PPE Medpro sold the previous government substandard kit and pocketed taxpayers’ hard-earned cash,” he said. True. But then what? The government will “pursue PPE Medpro with everything we’ve got to get these funds back.” Pursue them how? With stern letters? Legal proceedings that take years whilst the money disappears into offshore accounts and shell companies? The National Crime Agency is investigating, but investigating what exactly? The crime has been proven. The judgement has been made. The money is owed. What more investigation is needed before someone faces actual consequences?

According to PPE Medpro’s most recent accounts, the business had just £666,025 in net assets as of 31 July. Where did the rest go? The company used £4.2 million fighting the legal dispute, apparently. Taxpayers’ money spent fighting taxpayers’ attempt to get taxpayers’ money back. Mr Barrowman’s spokesman claims £83 million of the government deal was paid to other companies, though it’s unclear whether they’re being investigated. Even if true, that leaves tens of millions unaccounted for. The money doesn’t vanish. It goes somewhere. Usually somewhere warm, with flexible banking regulations and no extradition treaties.

The peerage adds another layer of insult. Baroness Mone secured this contract through the “VIP lane,” a system that gave priority access to PPE contracts for those with political connections. She recommended her husband’s company. The company got the contract. The taxpayer got faulty gowns. She got to keep her title. Because under current rules, peerages can only be removed by an act of Parliament. Cross-party calls for her removal have been made, naturally. But calls are not actions. Statements are not consequences. And whilst Parliament debates the constitutional niceties of whether someone who profited from faulty pandemic equipment should keep their seat in the House of Lords, Baroness Mone continues to enjoy all the privileges and status of her title.

The contrast with how ordinary people are treated for far lesser offences is obscene. A single mother in Bridgend was jailed in 2019 for failing to pay £4,742 in council tax arrears that had built up over years. In 2024, another woman was fined £736 for non-payment of a TV licence. She spoke anonymously about her experience of dealing with the fast-track system of processing cases.

The whole process, she says, was “terrifying”. At the time the enforcement officer knocked on her door, her partner had recently been jailed for domestic violence. He had previously taken control of her finances.

These are just random pulls from Google. However what they do point out is the comparison. This is not justice. This is not even the pretence of equal treatment under law. This is a system designed to protect the wealthy and connected whilst crushing everyone else. The rules that govern PPE Medpro’s conduct are written by people like Baroness Mone and her husband. The mechanisms for avoiding accountability, entering administration, dispersing assets, delaying proceedings, are all perfectly legal. The law doesn’t prohibit this behaviour. It facilitates it.

And here is what makes it worse. This scandal is not unique. The entire PPE procurement process during Covid was riddled with similar cases. Billions of pounds handed out through the VIP lane to companies with no experience in medical supplies but excellent political connections. Contracts awarded without proper tender processes. Equipment that didn’t work or never arrived. And throughout it all, the people making the decisions faced no consequences for failure because failure, for them, still meant profit.

The working people who followed the rules during lockdown, who stayed home, who sacrificed to protect the NHS and save lives, they paid for this. Through their taxes, through their labour, through the cuts to public services that will inevitably follow to balance the books depleted by this organised theft. They are the ones who will pay the interest accruing on that £145.6 million debt whilst Baroness Mone enjoys her title and whatever remains of the money.

What should happen is obvious. Criminal charges, not just civil proceedings. Asset seizures, not polite requests for payment. Prison sentences, not stern letters. The removal of her peerage immediately, not when Parliament gets around to debating constitutional reform. But none of this will happen because the system is not designed to punish people like Baroness Mone. It is designed to protect them.

Labour, to its credit, is making the right noises. But noises are not enough. If this government is serious about restoring faith in politics, about demonstrating that the law applies equally to all, about showing that profiteering from national tragedy carries real consequences, it needs to act with the same speed and severity that would be applied to any ordinary person who owed money they couldn’t or wouldn’t pay.

Because right now, the message is clear. Owe the council £1,200 and they’ll have bailiffs breaking down your door. Owe the taxpayer £122 million and you’ll get polite letters asking when it might be convenient to discuss repayment. One law for them. Another for the rest of us. And whilst that remains true, every lecture about shared sacrifice, every call for national unity, every claim that we’re all in this together rings hollow.

When stealing millions gets you less punishment than shoplifting bread, the system isn’t broken. It’s working exactly as designed.