Thread by @GoodLawProject

🚨 The final day of our High Court hearing over huge PPE contracts to firms with no prior experience and the 'VIP lane' is underway. 🚨

It begins with Government trying to submit new evidence... at what some might say is a rather late stage in proceedings🧐

The Judge has refused the application on the basis that the evidence comes too late and effectively provides a "moving target" for us and @EveryDoctorUK. Which is simply not fair in a hearing of this kind.

Government lawyer tells the Court that the offers on the High Priority Lane tended on average to be better, bigger offers, so they had an advantage because of their nature.

Judge asks if there is any evidence on this

Government lawyer says he cannot provide any reference beyond Cairnduff saying so in paras 45, 46 in their skeleton here - but will come back to it

Bit rich of Government to say "the story has emerged over time and in an uneven way".

That's only because they have refused to come clean at every turn and didn't even tell us about the VIP Lane

We're now on to submissions from Pestfix and Ayanda.

Ayanda's lawyer: "At no point did Mr Mills threaten to escalate to anyone…Or to pull rank in any way…it’s just another leap the Claimants make from the documents."

Here are some of those docs so you can see for yourself:

Our barrister Jason Coppel QC in summing up says Government made a number of incomplete, misleading and sometimes worse statements in pre-action correspondence...There was "a relentless campaign by the Defendant to obscure what really happened on significant issues."

We accept that as a general proposition, compared to a standard procurement, some stages had to be shortened...But even so, there were minimum standards and Moore himself said it was “important beyond words” that equipment was effective and safe.

"It is not rational to spend millions of pounds of public money on PPE which is unusable for its intended purpose because it does not meet the necessary specifications. Unusable PPE does not help to meet urgent needs."

- JCQC on why proper procurement is critical in a crisis.

The short point is it was a manifest error to buy tens of millions of pounds of masks which did not meet the NHS specification which all suppliers had been told had to be met.

"It’s a very very surprising position for a quarter of a billion pound public contract that there’s no record of the decision by the decision-maker."

One civil servant wrote of the Ayanda deal via a former govt advisor: "the bar seems to have been lowered on this one"

Two days before the £252.5 million contract was signed, a Cabinet Office official raised “major issues or concern” about the Ayanda contract, including a complete lack of financial information.

Despite the red flag, the deal was signed...

One government official commented privately: “sh*t hit the fan…due diligence hadn’t been carried out on Ayanda - I think something went wrong!!! big style!”

But nothing to see here says the Government 👀

On Ayanda, AB made our point for us, that Mills had registered on the portal but he was concerned...that his offer might not be picked up, therefore he used his connections in Government and was duly put in the VIP lane, where he did get the day to day attention.

And that's a wrap on our High Court hearing!💥

With your support, we've exposed Government practices that they would have much rather remained hidden. Now we await the judgment.

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A huge thank you to our brilliant legal team @alexrook1 @ris_law, Jason Coppel QC and Patrick Halliday who’ve battled with us + @EveryDoctorUK on this for months. 👏