Remember Andrew Mills? Liz Truss advisor, architect of the VIP lane red carpet to riches Ayanda deal which involved the NHS blowing £155m on unusable facemasks?
We explained in this thread how the deal involved us paying up to £166m over and above the prices we were paying to other mask suppliers (which of course themselves embedded huge profits).
Remember Tim Horlick, owner of Ayanda, saying "I am not at liberty to disclose" how much profit he was making "but it will be in our accounts in due course"?

(Of course he is "at liberty to disclose" it. He just doesn't want to.)
Well.
We've uncovered an interesting thing. Back in mid July 2020 a previously dormant company called Leonmead converted from being a (normal) limited company to an unlimited company.
And then a week later our old friend Andrew Mills becomes a director and his boxfresh £100 vehicle Prospermill (how they laughed!) Limited becomes the "person with significant control".
What is an unlimited company? A very odd thing indeed. @GoodLawProject is blessed with two tax lawyers and we'd never seen one before. But there is this: s.448 of the Companies Act 2006 says they don't have to file accounts (where certain conditions are satisfied).
Now, at this stage you might be beginning to smell a very plump rat.

But never fear. Section 448(2)(a) says that an unlimited company still has to publish its accounts where it is owned by a limited company. And Leonmead is owned by Prospermill Limited. Phew! Right?
Hmm.

On 28 October was heard in the office of an obscure accountant the reverberations of a penny dropping.

And three months after Leonmead became an unlimited company, Prospermill (the architect of the Ayanda deal and Leonmead's owner) also became an unlimited company.
And now the coup de grâce.

S.448(a) says Leonmead can only not publish accounts if for its whole accounting period it was not a subsidiary of a limited company. And so Leonmead extends its accounting period to several days after Prospermill became an unlimited company.
What this means is that for the whole of (unlimited company) Leonmead's accounting period beginning 1.11.20 it will have been owned by (unlimited company) Prospermill and won't have to publish its accounts.
Back in August, when I broke the story of Ayanda and the £155m you and I spent on unusable facemasks I said I expected the vast majority of the profit would be Andrew Mills' and Ayanda would take a relatively small fee.
I still think that's true now. I think Ayanda - which in April when the deal was done probably thought it was getting a healthy slice for doing very little - is now likely to feel aggrieved at being the putz which has taken much of the political heat for not enough.
And the real money will have been made by Liz Truss' adviser, Andrew 'VIP' Mills, who the NAO seems to point the finger at for continuing to lobby after the deal was done for payments to be made quickly.

But thanks to the Unlimited Company shenanigans we will likely never know.

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More from @JolyonMaugham

17 Jan
I'm more interested in who will save our country from corrupt politics.
Good distraction though.👆
Robert Jenrick’s constituency was awarded funding by his department as part of a process that was opaque and not impartial. thetimes.co.uk/article/robert…
Read 5 tweets
16 Jan
A genuinely fascinating interview with a man who managed to rise to Attorney General despite the profound handicaps in our politics of modesty and thoughtfulness. instituteforgovernment.org.uk/ministers-refl…
Interesting - for me at least - to read him struggle with a question I also do: about the analytical content of the role and responsible limits of criticism of judges.
Embedded in the (now) orthodox belief that judicial diversity is a good thing is the assumption that judges bring who they are to what they do. If this is true (and imo it is) it must follow that it can be right to ask whether who a judge is has wrongly infected their reasoning.
Read 4 tweets
15 Jan
Just been sent a screenshot by a contact in the PPE world offering him IIR facemasks at $0.039. The 150m masks we purchased from Liz Truss' adviser via Ayanda for £97.5m we could buy today for £4.5m.
What makes this even more obscene is that the Ayanda contract had this clause in it - a clause I believe to be unique to politically connected VIP lane Ayanda - which said Ayanda could deliver its IIR facemasks late.
Here's what the National Audit Office said about how much PPE the Government bought at those top of the market prices: five years worth.
Read 4 tweets
14 Jan
6 March 2019. And 14 January 2021.

They lie and lie and lie again.
Reference to 2019: gov.uk/government/new…
In its Manifesto for the 2019 General Election, the Conservative Party promised to "raise standards in... workers' rights." And now we learn they plan to cut them.
Read 5 tweets
13 Jan
Here is Gavin Williamson talking this afternoon about the decision on the evening of 14 December to force Greenwich to reopen Schools: "At that stage none of us were aware of the new variant."
And here is Matt Hancock earlier that day telling the House of Commons about the existence of the new variant. hansard.parliament.uk/commons/2020-1…
Matt Hancock also spoke of "the faster spread in the South of England" but Williamson claimed: "You'd seen authorities and schools right across the North of England and right across the Midlands... with case rates much higher than we'd seen in Greenwich."
Read 4 tweets
11 Jan
Like you, we are concerned that private providers might be looking at pandemic food provision for the vulnerable as a chance to make supersize profits.

So in December we wrote to Government about the quality of the food boxes given in lockdown one... goodlawproject.org/news/food-parc…
... we now have a (completely inadequate) response from Government about its design and management of the £200m foodboxes contract (given without any tender process) which we are considering with Counsel. We expect to make an announcement about next steps shortly.
Legal stuff aside, it's just deplorable that so many providers seem to have thrown away their moral compass and now see pound signs where they should see basic decency and civic responsibility.
Read 5 tweets

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