Another Tory PPE Scandal: Why won’t they put our needs first?
Another day, another whiff of corruption. Liz Truss, a woman most famous for being obsessed with selling cheese and opening pork markets is now up to her neck in another Tory PPE scandal. £250m has been paid to a company called Ayanda Capital Limited of which about £150m has been wasted because the face masks they’ve provided have the wrong kind of straps, rendering them completely unusable. They can’t use the behind the ears elastic loop jobbies that have become so familiar to us now, due to the risk they can ping off, as I’m sure some of you are familiar with — the type needed have to tie behind the head. So how many duff masks did we buy? 50 million of them. How could this happen? Was this company not properly vetted? Surely a company specialising in medical equipment should have supplied the correct type of mask? Surely they knew what standard we required?
Oh, but there’s an assumption there — that this company is a medical company. After all, what kind of British govt would source PPE from anywhere else? This one would. Ayanda Capital Limited is run by a chap called Tim Horlick. Tim is a former investment banker, having previously been the director of investment bank, Kleinwort Benson. Not a doctor, not a nurse, but a banker.
If you go onto the Ayanda Capital website, the page greets you with a message about them being London-based & focused on a broad investment strategy — so far, so bankerish. It goes onto say that they ‘specialise in currency trading, offshore property, private equity and trade financing’. Still not seeing anything about PPE procurement, or anything resembling health at all. You can click on a link saying what we do, and you would hope to spot something related to health services in there, perhaps in their lovely flow chart but you’ll be disappointed. You’ll have to visit and take a look for yourself since their disclaimer page expressly forbids reproduction of any part of the site without permission, so do pop along to https://www.ayandacapital.com/ and see for yourself.
Now Ayanda were awarded the contract for supplying PPE back in April. There was no competitive tender process amongst interested companies either, it was simply handed over to an investment company based in a tax haven — one of the worst ones at that — Mauritius, so no taxes to pay here either, instead of a company that actually supplies PPE. Ayanda Capital had never provided PPE before, yet this is who the govt paid over £40m of their £250m package to up front, for face masks.
It comes down to a chap called Andrew Mills. Mills is the director of a company called Prospermill, which had secured sole production capacity rights of a large Chinese factory and set about claiming he could produce face masks in bulk, however Mills is also one of twelve advisors on the Board of Trade which is chaired by international development secretary, Liz Truss. So what are we looking at here, a chap with a factory ready to produce face masks advising Liz Truss who to go to, to go about procuring…face masks. The hilarious part here is that Prospermill is apparently only worth £100 — how did such a preposterously valued company get sole production rights to a large factory in China? We don’t know. So where does Ayanda Capital fit in then? Guess who’s LinkedIn profile shows him to have been a senior board advisor to Ayanda Capital since March? Andrew Mills, though try finding him on Ayanda’s website. It’s claimed in court documents from the Good Law Project who have investigated this, that Mills requested the Department for Health & Social Care (DHSC) work with Ayanda Capital rather than his own Prospermill company, since Ayanda had the necessary international payment infrastructure so could process payments quicker.
So we’ve got a guy with a factory to produce face masks through his £100 company advising a minister who to go to for face masks, who to work through to expedite payment which, when you cut to the chase is essentially Truss agreeing to pay one of her Board of Trade advisors for face masks on the basis that he has a factory! A factory that has produced 50m duff masks and you just know Mills himself has done very nicely out of this. PPE procurement contracts for the govt typically have profit margins of between 10%-20%.
It’s not as if there isn’t procedures put in place surrounding procurement — they are put in place to prevent wasting public funds and cronyism and Liz Truss is guilty on both counts here.
The govt needs to provide the necessary PPE to hospitals but are more focused on how they can do it on the cheap and when they surround themselves with people more interested in making money than anything else, it becomes a disaster. Another outsourcing disaster. Another waste of public money, another example of corruption since there was no democratic, fair tendering process. We have the worst death toll in Europe and STILL its more about money when it comes to protecting the people who not only become ill, but the people on the frontline, dying through their commitment, their vocation, to help. Public money handed over to companies with no experience of producing PPE and screwing up.
As some of you will surely remember, when it comes to PPE, this isn’t even the first time the govt has failed to supply PPE when its needed. They tried to cover their cuts to the NHS by supplying PPE that had expired, with new sticky labels over the top showing new, fake expiry dates. They ordered PPE from Turkey that didn’t turn up on time, even after deploying the RAF to go and fetch it directly, such was the shortage here and when it arrived, wasn’t fit for purpose as it failed to meet our safety standards.
This also isn’t the only contract that the Good Law Project flagged up as decidedly dodgy. The govt ordered £108m worth of isolation suits of a pest control company called Pestfix, which employs just 16 people and has assets of less than £20K and paid another £108m for gowns from a wholesale confectioner called Clandeboye. Once again, there was no competitive tendering process for these contracts.
Government cuts left us scrabbling about to find PPE and even when the need to fess up and make good comes along and the govt can ensure they get it right going forwards, they screw up again by putting their mates and their ability to make money for themselves first. Even in a pandemic, making money is all that matters to those running the country and those advising them too. This is apparently the largest PPE contract the Good Law Project have ever seen and it’s been a jobs for the boys balls-up. Liz Truss should if she had an honour resign, but you know as well as I do she won’t. When the Government is this dodgy, this corrupt, it is more important than ever to question everything.
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