Thread by @Sakura509

"Maugham has, over recent months, launched crowdfunding for a legal challenge to the appointment of Dido Harding – wife of Tory MP and government “Anti-Corruption Champion” John Penrose – "

"- as head of the newly formed National Institute for Health Protection, without any interview process or open competition."

"It has ongoing proceedings aimed at answering the question “Just how does public money end up in the pockets of Cummings’s friends?” "

"Separately, last week it opened the latest in a series of cases against the Department of Health to shed light on the award of PPE contracts worth more than £250m to Saiger, a Florida-based jewellery company with no experience of supplying PPE."

"That involved a £21m payment to a middleman – a contract offered without any advertisement or competitive tender process."

TRUTH will out! ⚖️

“The fact is I really, really don’t like acts of dishonesty by the state,” he says, of his motivation. “I don’t like the government misleading the public. It feels to me, every time I hear it, like a direct attack on democracy. And that was really winding me up.”

Many agree! ✊

"Waiting a couple of years for the inevitable public inquiry didn’t seem enough for Patterson. EveryDoctor itself had partly grown out of a Facebook group, the Political Mess, that she had established, in which healthcare professionals could share information."

“What we were noticing was that there was a total dissonance between the speed with which clinicians have to respond to situations at work and how our professional bodies behave, which is mostly in established committee meetings, where things take months to decide.”

"So when Covid arrived, the immediate thought at EveryDoctor was, “this is going to get bad really quickly – and no one is going to move fast enough to hold the government to account."

Evidence in plain view - #LiarJohnson & UK Government LIES, MISLEADS & EVADES accountability.

"Patterson watched the government falling over itself trying to control the media cycle, releasing information without proper checks, launching “world-beating schemes” while on the ground little was changing."

Plus ça Change!

"While EveryDoctor helped to assemble that real-life strand of testimony for the Good Law Project’s PPE case, Maugham continued to investigate those companies that had won contracts."

"In July he tweeted what he called “the most extraordinary thread I’ve ever written”, which revealed how a company called Ayanda Capital Ltd had won a £252m contract to supply millions of face masks to the Department of Health in April, at the height of the pandemic."

"The firm specialised in “currency trading, offshore property, private equity and trade financing” and was based in Mauritius."

"“What could possibly go wrong?” Maugham wondered. Plenty."

"The Ayanda contract included an order for 50m high-strength FFP2 medical masks, which on arrival were found not to meet NHS standards (Ayanda maintains that they adhered to the specifications they had been given)."

"With the news last week of the departure of Dominic Cummings and the promise of a “reset” of Johnson’s government, I wonder if Maugham believes that the culture that resists scrutiny will change?"

"He is not convinced, particularly in light of the footnote that Cummings will continue to “work from home” on Operation Moonshot."

“The harm that is done when someone shoves cultural norms around truth-telling and governance off a cliff, isn’t undone if you push him off after them,” he suggests. “It will take a concerted effort to reverse that harm – and as yet there is zero evidence of that intention.”

theguardian.com/law/2020/nov/2…

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