Thread by @JolyonMaugham

The biggest VIP lane winner of the pandemic was a company called Innova. Good Law Project has seen a cache of documents from US courts about its 🤯 affairs. 🧵

We have identified forty five separate payments made to Innova by the Department of Health averaging over £100m EACH: a total of more than £4.5 billion paid by us to Innova. The court documents suggest those transactions generated profits of between $750m and $2bn for Innova.

Innova’s UK agent, Disruptive Nanotechnologies (aka Tried and Tested) is suing Innova for fraud. Robert Kasprzak, Innova’s lawyer, is suing Charles Huang, Innova’s CEO for fraud.

Kenning Xu, who worked with Charles Huang at Innova, is suing Charles Huang for fraud. Charles Huang is suing Daniel Elliott, Innova’s previous CEO, for fraud.

And we hold a copy of a letter from Matt Hancock thanking Mr Elliott and Kasprzak “on behalf of the entire country”.

From a health point of view, the Innova contracts were not a success. The US Food and Drug Administration said the tests “could present a serious risk to the public health”.

The FDA also suggested that Innova had falsified data: “the clinical study data you submitted… was identical to data previously provided by other manufacturers”. fda.gov/inspections-co…

The FDA asked users to “Destroy the tests by placing them in the trash” and expressed “significant concerns that the performance of the test has not been adequately established, presenting a risk to health.”

The spend with Innova amounted to over 12% of the £37bn spent on NHS Test and Trace which the Chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee suggested made no measurable difference to the progress of the pandemic.

So how did all this happen?

Innova won its first contract after someone called Kim Thonger sent an email to “Dominic” at 10.39 am about his “DoubleTestTM” product - you can read the emails here ). drive.google.com/file/d/1iss3u9…

Within an hour, at the height of the pandemic, Mr Cummings had read the email from this obscure entity, passed it to William Warr, a Special Adviser at Number 10, and he had read it and replied (“Thanks for this note to Dom.”)

We don’t know how Mr Thonger got Mr Cummings’ email address or how he came to address him as “Dominic”. 10 Downing Street denies there were any earlier email, text or WhatsApp messages with Mr Cummings in the period beginning 1 June 2020.

This all has the air of what Mr Cummings, in his statement to the Covid inquiry, accused others of doing - creating false evidence trails to cover up the deal decision.

The story told by Disruptive Nanotechnologies (DNL) - the legal name for Tried and Tested - is rather different. In its court filing it says it submitted forms to DHSC and “navigated the formal requirements”.

It said it was able to use “the connections they had established within the DHSC to introduce the new antigen tests” and as a result of its efforts was awarded a $138m contract (the first of many, as we will see).

Neither Dominic Cummings - nor William Warr - are mentioned.

For Innova's part, the story Robert Kasprzak, one of the principals of Innova, tells of how the contract came to be won is different again. He said the work was done by Daniel Elliott and him and doesn’t mention Disruptive Nanotechnologies aka Tried and Tested at all.

Back to the email sent by Kim Thonger to "Dominic". Was there any sensible basis for this email to be taken seriously?

“Tried and Tested” was the trading name for a company called Disruptive Nanotechnology Limited. This is what its balance sheet looked like at the time.

And the journalist David Rose reports that, before the pandemic, its owners Charles Palmer and Kim Thonger worked in fashion and commercial property respectively.

It is hard to understand why two senior Special Advisers at Number 10 would take this email seriously.

As to Innova, a lawsuit filed by one of its principals, Kasprzak, against another, Charles Huang, points out it was formed at the start of the pandemic and had no assets.

Pasca Capital, which owns Innova, has also confirmed in a lawsuit against one of its former officers, Daniel Elliott, that Innova was formed in March 2020.

We know Innova was in the Government’s Covid Contracts VIP lane () but how much money did it get?gov.uk/government/pub…

We scraped published Government payment data and we can see that 45 payments were made to Innova for contracts totalling £4,507,552,872.05.

Yes, more than four thousand five hundred million pounds - or over £125 for each and every income tax payer in the country.

Since the contracts, Disruptive Nanotechnologies has sued Innova for fraud. It claims it was duped into giving up commissions of 10% of the sales to the UK Government.

Robert Kasprzak, Innova’s lawyer, has also sued its CEO Charles Huang, for fraud calling him a “high end con-artist”.

He also says Charles Huang had a warrant issued for his arrest and has been trying to get himself knighted in the United Kingdom.

How profitable were the Innova contracts?

Well, Daniel Elliott’s 750,000 shares were purchased in June 2022 for £75m, a figure said to be less than their value and after, Robert Kasprzak claims, vast sums were frittered away.

750,000 shares is said in multiple lawsuits to be 11% of the equity in Innova’s parent company. This suggests it was worth more than $680m even after the “frittering away” of hundreds of millions.

The case pleaded by Robert Kasprzak suggests the profit was much higher: that one of the founders, Charles Huang... squandered or moved to undisclosed locations... more than $1bn of Pasca assets generated from the UK sales.

And a further lawsuit against Charles Huang for fraud by another of its founders, Kening Xu, suggests the gross profit from the transactions was over $2bn.

For its part, Innova (and its parent Pasaca Capital), have also sued Daniel Elliott and Robert Kasprzak for theft and fraud of hundreds of millions of dollars.

Nevertheless Matt Hancock hailed Elliott and Kasprzak as heroes and thanked them “on behalf of the entire country.”

They supplied £4.5bn of tests that the US FDA suggested be “destroyed by placing them in the trash” and made hundreds of millions or billions in profit.

Personally I find it difficult to improve on how I put the matter to the LA Times in July 2021, “Governance has fundamentally disappeared. Lots of things are happening, for reasons that are very, very difficult to understand.” latimes.com/business/story…

Watch this space... There is more to come.