Last night, I said that I was aware of evidence DHSC had been paying higher prices for PPE to connected suppliers. And that I was working to put that evidence into the public domain. We are in possession of a lot of evidence that suggests as much, but I can share the following.
The Ayanda contract was entered into on 29 April 2020 (you can read it here contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/Attachm…). It was entered into by Ayanda Capital Limited, owned through a particularly ugly tax haven, by the Horlick family.
However, the original offer came from Prospermill Limited, a boxfresh £100 company that had never traded and which was owned by then Board of Trade advisor (now departed), Breitbart, Liz Truss and Hard Brexit enthusiast, Andrew Mills.
When we originally sent our pre-action letter to the Government in relation to Ayanda - which you can read here goodlawproject.org/wp-content/upl… - we said that the price at the time the contract was awarded to Ayanda for Type IIR single use face masks was between 39-46p.
The Government wrote back to us saying our figures were incorrect. Prevailing market prices at the time were significantly higher being "approximately 59-64p per unit instead."
And, from the published Ayanda contract (see the second tweet in this thread), you can work out we paid 65p per IIR mask.
(If you look at the contract, you will also see that Ayanda was only obliged to make delivery to Shanghai Airport: in other words we had to pay to fly those IIR masks to the UK which will have cost tens of millions more.)
Remember, too, that not only were we buying these for delivery in China, but we were buying a vast quantity - 150m - on which we might expect a discount. Still, we paid Ayanda a per unit price of 65p (slightly higher than the 59-64p unit price Government said then prevailed.)
But what price was Government paying everyone else?

I have seen a copy of a leaked document which gives prices paid for IIR facemasks. The prices it gives "may" include logistics (i.e. they may be the higher prices for delivery in the UK rather than lower for delivery in China.)
And what that document shows is that the average price paid by Government for IIR masks in the UK on 29 April was not the 59-64p Government told us in correspondence but 41p (within the 39-46p we had stated in our letter).
150m masks multiplied by (even if you ignore volume discount and air-freight) an average overpayment of 24p per mask equals an (at least) £36m overpayment for these masks to an entity connected to Government.

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More from @JolyonMaugham

13 Oct
Yesterday I showed how, on Govt's own figures, it overpaid a politically connected PPE supplier by £36m+ for IIR facemasks.

In fact, if you look at the contract as a whole, which included FFP2 facemasks, the overpayment was much higher. I'll come back to that in a moment.
But, first, bear in mind that although contracts were awarded by DHSC the key triaging of bids and supplier due diligence was undertaken by Cabinet Office.

That casts a certain pall on explanations like this - provided by Ayanda to journalists - about the role of Andrew Mills. Image
I will return in the coming days to some correlations between highly generous pricing and relationships between the beneficiaries of that pricing and key figures in Cabinet Office.
Read 12 tweets
12 Oct
I am hugely grateful to everyone who has contributed to our crowdfunder in which - along with @LaylaMoran, @CarolineLucas and @Debbie_abrahams - we are seeking to force Government to come clean about the (more than) £3bn of PPE contracts they are keeping under wraps. /1
We have lifted the stretch target to £75k. This very substantial sum is also considerably less than our exposure to costs should we fight and lose. But it is also considerably more than it will cost us if we succeed (and we believe we should). /2
I am afraid - although I have been crowdfunding for over four years - I have not yet found any comfortable way to balance this equation. Even where you can be confident any surplus will be used for good reasons it is sub-optimal for us to raise more than we need. /3
Read 6 tweets
11 Oct
By letter of 7 September 2020, Matt Hancock via his lawyers told us "this year [PPE] contracts worth over £11 billion have been awarded to date" had been awarded by DHSC.
On 4 August 2020, Matt Hancock via his lawyers told us "the PPE buying programme... is no longer operating."
By regulation 50 of the Public Procurement Regulations the Government has to - it has no discretion - publish contract award notices within 30 days.
Read 6 tweets
9 Oct
If you might allow me the analogy, having two year waiting lists before you can be assessed to see whether you should be prescribed puberty blockers is like having five month waiting lists for an abortion. It's effectively a denial of treatment.
The consequence of denying safe, properly regulated access to puberty blockers is the same as the consequence of denying safe, properly regulated access to abortion. It drives those who need that care to riskier providers and massively increases the dangers to them.
And every attempt to remove a provider from the field - @TaviAndPort and now @GenderGP - makes life more dangerous for those who need that care. It will cause - directly and indirectly - massive harm to children.
Read 4 tweets
8 Oct
The effect of making it impossible for transgender kids to access regulated wrap-around healthcare in the UK was to drive them and their families to piece together bits and pieces of healthcare from across jurisdictions and administer it with the help of YouTube videos...
... this is plainly more dangerous for those kids and their families.

But for the hobbyists who treat the bodies of transgender kids as a battleground for their political beliefs - who think they know better than actual experts - this is not enough. They are now working to...
... disrupt that patchwork (which for many in the UK includes @GenderGP) of care.

The inevitable result of this is that transgender children and their families will access treatment (readily available throughout the liberal world with the exception of the UK) via the dark web...
Read 6 tweets
6 Oct
History tells us that denying safe, properly regulated access to abortion causes women to seek out dangerous unregulated access. In the UK we effectively deny safe, properly regulated access to reversible puberty blockers. So children seek out other access which is less safe.
And it's not only that trans children's access to reversible puberty blockers carries unnecessary risk. It's also that their difficulties in accessing blockers drive some to move more quickly to Stage III (after therapy and blockers) of partially irreversible cross-sex hormones.
If you don't have reversible 'blockers' during puberty the shape and form of your body changes in ways that are both highly distressing to you and physically irreversible. So the families of trans children I speak to don't feel they have a choice about taking reversible blockers.
Read 5 tweets

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