Thread by @JolyonMaugham

Months of work. Multiple leakers. Johnson's inner circle. Falsehoods from civil servants. Vast sums of public cash. WTF facts. And, when all is said and done, a smell amply bad enough, I think, to spark a criminal investigation. goodlawproject.org/patel-mirza-an…

There is so much dirt in this story that it's hard to arrange it in tidy little narrative piles. So what I'm going to do over the course of the next few hours and days is just highlight some remarkable elements of in a tweet thread.

Why did Ms Mirza, Johnson's political adviser, who had nothing to do with procurement, push the case of Samir Jassal a man with no obvious ability to supply PPE but with close connections to three Tory PMs? Why did she speak repeatedly to his associates and go "above and beyond"?

Why did a civil servant tell x we had enough Meixin 2016v facemasks on 2 July but Cabinet Office push for Jassal's associates to get a £103m contract (at a price £50m more than the average) for Meixin 2016vs facemasks on 6 July because there was a "desperate shortage".

Why was the Accounting Officer - who was asked to sign off the £102.6m contract - not told that x was offering to supply the same facemasks in the same quantities at the same time? Why did Cabinet Office not go to x and ask him to beat the price Jassal's associate was charging?

Shergill, who worked for Pharmaceuticals Direct and (notionally) engaged Jassal, had two companies. Why did the first bill £16.37m to Pharmaceuticals Direct for services in 2020? How did the second come to have £10m in Feb 2021 having been worth nothing in March 2020?

Why did both companies change names and immediately wind themselves up? Was it to create a smokescreen and/or justify not keeping accounting records? What happened to the vast sums of money? Did those pushing for Pharmaceuticals Direct to win contracts have a financial interest?

PDL says its deal with Shergill was 'no contract no fee'. What could Shergill (and Jassal) offer to justify these enormous fees? What leverage did they have to persuade Munira Mirza and Priti Patel (and others) to intercede on PDL's behalf? Why did Mirza and Patel intercede?

Important to say clearly, we have no evidence that Mirza, Patel or other Cabinet Ministers had any financial interest in the PDL contracts.