TODAY: we’re in Court battling Government over millions of pounds of unusable PPE and the fast track ‘VIP lane’ for political connections.

They’d rather we weren’t paying attention. Help spread the word. actions.goodlawproject.org/subscribe
And we're off! Our 5 day High Court hearing starts here.

Read our skeleton argument and follow our live updates from day 1 in court here ⬇️ glplive.org/1805-c-skele
Our barrister Jason Coppel QC tells the Court: "In a transparency case the parties should not be prohibited from mentioning the amount of public money wasted on a contract for no good reason of sensitivity."
"Our case is that Mills (Ayanda) got preferential treatment and had an extraordinary degree of interaction with Blackburn and Cairnduff because he was a VIP and was threatening to escalate to ministers at every turn" - Jason Coppel QC
"This is not a theoretical breach of equal treatment that we are complaining about: on the facts there were real advantages to being in the High Priority Lane." Our barrister Jason Coppel QC currently making the case for cross-examination of govt
Both Pestfix and Multibrands emailed the Department for Health offering to supply PPE in March 2020.

Multibrands received no response.

By contrast, Pestfix - who had a personal connection - were put through the VIP Lane.
Unbelievable scenes - Government arguing we are trying to introduce evidence late on the VIP Lane - when they spent months covering up its existence!
"The contracts secured by PestFix and Ayanda were directly attributable to their VIP status; many other suppliers who had made credible offers of PPE but who were not fortunate enough to have connections in Government did not have their officers progressed.” - Jason Coppel QC
The limited knowledge of the VIP lane excluded many expert organisations:

“National medical associations with expert knowledge, including the BMA and the Royal College of Nursing were not told about the VIP lane and were therefore prevented from referring known PPE suppliers.”
Mr Coppel added: “The reality is clear: being a VIP supplier meant (a) getting a ‘foot in the door’...then (b) being guided through the award process up to contract signature.

“VIP suppliers’ offers were progressed through that process in a way that non-VIP suppliers’ were not.”
The awards we are concerned with are a small sample of the overall total but worth some £700m. The processes that Government adopted give rise to very serious concerns as to the management of large amounts of public money and, we say, obvious illegality for three reasons:
1. The system for awarding contracts was non-transparent, unequal and unfair.

2. Govt established a VIP lane specifically to give priority to contacts of ministers + senior officials.

3. The Defendant spent vast sums of money without first applying basic technical checks
The outcome of this was a truly tragic waste of public money and enormous quantities of PPE at inflated prices which was useless to the NHS. Of the hundreds of millions of pounds spent on Pestfix and Ayanda, well over half was wasted - JCQC
"Technical assurance is a vital part of the due diligence in any public sector procurement...This is not simply a bureaucratic exercise. It is important beyond words that the soldier on the front line has equipment which meets the relevant performance standards..."
...This was equally true of the PPE being procured for the NHS - it was needed to protect healthcare workers and patients from infection."

Extract from Mr Moore's witness statement - an MOD civil servant seconded to DHSC from April - July 2020
This summarises in a sentence the key advantage with VIP lane:

"Support provided from high profile people require a rapid response and managing through the process."
Key advantages of being in the VIP lane:

"The personal handling, the rapid response, the managing through the process and not waiting in line with everybody else...You don’t languish on the portal, don’t go down the bulk route - you get a phone call within the hour."
Finally + importantly, VIPs got intel which non-VIPs didn’t.

This is clear from the events in Ayanda where Mr Mills, while he is negotiating for FFP2 masks, is asked whether he could also supply IIR masks. He hadn't offered to-he was invited to because he was a VIP in the system

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with Good Law Project

Good Law Project Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @GoodLawProject

19 May
🚨 Day 2 of our High Court hearing over the PPE procurement scandal has begun 🚨

Starting with Ayanda - the hedge fund with political connections awarded £252 million worth of contracts and put through the 'VIP Lane'. THREAD ⬇️standard.co.uk/news/uk/ayanda…
The contract with Ayanda resulted from communications from Mr Mills, a former advisor to the Department for International Trade. Their allocation to the VIP lane worked as follows: Image
As soon as Ayanda was allocated to the VIP lane, an individual pseudonymised as “1U” put pressure on an official to deal with it as quickly as possible: “This is likely to get escalated to Ministerial level in next 20 mins or so.”
Read 28 tweets
19 May
Government has consistently said that although ministers could refer offers from people to supply PPE, they were not involved in the award of contracts.

We've uncovered Whatsapps showing Ministers “lobbied” officials to chase the progress of VIP contracts
theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
One WhatsApp shows an official saying that if they had a tracking system for PPE offers from companies referred by ministers, MPs or civil servants, it would save the procurement team from “being lobbied further by ministers/VIPs etc and the like”.
Internal documents released as part of our legal action reveal that Ayanda, a “family office” finance house, was awarded two PPE contracts for a total £252m having been referred to the VIP lane. Its representative, Andrew Mills, was an adviser to Liz Truss, the trade secretary.
Read 5 tweets
29 Apr
EXCLUSIVE: we can now reveal four more companies awarded contracts through the VIP Lane.

Clandeboye Agencies, P14 Medical, Luxe Lifestyle and Meller Designs. glplive.org/ppe-hearing
P14 Medical, run by a Tory councillor and donor, was awarded £276m in PPE contracts. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politi…
Meller Designs, run by David Meller a large Tory donor and trustee of the rightwing lobby group Policy Exchange, was given more than £160m in PPE contracts. theguardian.com/world/2021/apr…
Read 7 tweets
29 Apr
📢And we're off! Our hearing over Matt Hancock's refusal to provide what we believe is critical evidence on our PPE challenges has begun.

Follow this thread for live updates from Court 👇 @EveryDoctorUK goodlawproject.org/news/ppe-urgen…
First up - our barrister Jason Coppel QC will be taking the Court through our arguments:

"The Defendant has made late and only partial disclosure and has refused to provide critical information on important parts of the case against him." glplive.org/2904-c-skele
Good Law Project and @EveryDoctorUK "are left in a position of being unable fairly to interrogate and challenge the account given by the Defendant in its evidence."
Read 26 tweets
27 Apr
NEW: The British public should not be paying to further the electoral ambitions of the Conservative Party.

We have now issued the first step in legal proceedings. huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/politcal…
Over the last few weeks we’ve seen a worrying trend of Government videos and social media content being misappropriated to advance Conservative Party political messaging. We believe the costs are coming out of the public purse, not the party coffers. glplive.org/cj-pa-2704
Government is legally required to publish - and follow - a policy to ensure a clear dividing line between informative communications, which can be funded by taxpayers, and electoral communications, governed by strict campaign finance rules.
Read 5 tweets
22 Apr
📣And we're off! The urgent hearing in our PPE cases with @EveryDoctorUK over the direct awards of contracts to Ayanda, Pestfix and Clandeboye has begun.

Follow here for live updates from the Court... crowdjustice.com/case/108millio…
Our barrister Jason Coppel QC taking the Court through our skeleton argument: when engaged in Judicial Review, the duty of candour requires that government must lay “all its cards face upwards on the table”. Its duty “applies to all information relevant to issues in the case”.
"It is remarkable that a government department would point blank refuse to explain how it has gone about conducting its disclosure exercise." - Jason Coppel QC

Government's own guidance states redaction is not the norm. Read our skele in full: glplive.org/2104-c-skele
Read 19 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Too expensive? Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal Become our Patreon

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us on Twitter!

:(