Michelle Mone admits she stands to benefit from £60m PPE profit

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.

In response to questions from the Guardian, three separate firms of lawyers emphatically denied from late 2020 that the couple were involved, variously saying that she “was not connected to PPE Medpro in any capacity”, had no “association” with PPE Medpro, and “never had any role or function in PPE Medpro, nor in the process by which contracts were awarded” to the company.

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.

“I did make an error in saying to the press that I wasn’t involved,” she said. “Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes, and I regret and I’m sorry for not saying straight out, yes, I am involved.”

Barrowman said the company had made profits of approximately one-third on the £203m contracts – approximately £67m. Some of the money, he confirmed for the first time, was transferred to the Keristal Trust.

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. The documents indicated that Barrowman then transferred £29m to the Keristal Trust.

Confirming the profits made, Barrowman told Kuenssberg: “We made a good return for the risk involved, and the risk involved was considerable.”

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.

PPE Medpro is defending the legal action. Mone and Barrowman both said they had done nothing wrong, except, Mone said, lie to the press.

“That is not a crime,” Mone said.