Thread by @JolyonMaugham

If you want to know how much £££ the favoured few were making from PPE contracts, and you do, then buckle up. 🧵

This judgment concerns the purchase by Uniserve Limited of 80 million IIR masks from a company called Hitex. The contract was dated 21 April 2020.
bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…

Uniserve was a VIP (gov.uk/government/new…) and was introduced by Lord Agnew (a Tory Peer who quit after complaining about pandemic fraud). It also had links to Health Minister Julia Lopez (julialopez.co.uk/news/visiting-…) and they share the same address.

The per unit price paid by Uniserve to Hitex looks to be 22p per mask (certainly that was the price paid for one million of the 80 million purchased - snip from judgment).

Uniserve also appears to have entered into an "introduction and supply agreement" under which it agree to pay a further 24p a mask to a company called Caramel (again - snip from judgment).

All perfectly normal?!?

So it agreed to pay a total of 46p per mask.

We can also see that, a week earlier on 14 April, Uniserve had agreed to sell some IIR masks to the Government (contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/bc5b55d…).

What Government is happy for us to see is that the total price paid was £69.6m. But Government hates you knowing what unit price it paid (or you paid) so it tried to redact the quantity. But if you look carefully you can see Uniserve contracted to deliver 80 million IIR masks.

And from those numbers you can calculate the per unit price Uniserve sold to us at: 87p. And you can work out the per unit gross profit: 41p. Multiply that by 80m and you get Uniserve's gross profit of £32.8m.

That's a pretty staggering number - £32.8m gross profit on a contract for £69.6m: a gross profit margin of 47%.

As far as I am aware, this is the first transaction where we can see both the price at which an entity sold to us and the price at which it purchased.

Let's just contextualise that 47% number a little.

If extrapolated across the £12.5bn we spent on PPE it represents £5.875bn of profit, much of which will have gone to associates of Ministers who were glad-handled through the sleazy and illegal VIP lane.

It is gross not net profit: eg it looks as though Uniserve has to transport the PPE to the UK. But we are also aware of other transactions where buyers received kick-backs from commission agents. There's no evidence Uniserve got a kickback from Carmel but I wouldn't rule it out.

Uniserve, btw, although being a well-connected VIP had no experience of supplying PPE (committees.parliament.uk/publications/6…).

This is only one transaction.

But it does suggest that the purchase of the 15,000 pallets of PPE we now plan to incinerate every month did serve one purpose - that of delivering extraordinary profits into the hands of well-connected VIPs.

(Better link to the judgment referred to above here: bailii.org/ew/cases/EWHC/…)