Boris's Billions

Wyllow3

I think the World Health Organisation is crying out for more funding to do just this, then you have dictators like Trump rubbishing the idea of co-operation, a failure to see we stand or fall together, and starting wars up with money better spent.

Or at least better cooperation with the EU, but thankfully now re the EU we have intellectual sharing schemes returning, and we should look at this as well as regards medicine sharing

"The European Union operates several intellectual property (IP) sharing, licensing, and financial support schemes to promote innovation and protect creators. Key initiatives include the EUIPO SME Fund, the Out-of-Commerce Works Portal, and the EU's Crisis Compulsory Licensing framework

Extremely good point!

It’s no wonder Trump rubbished the WHO, have you seen his current Health Secretary (or whatever they are called across the pond)

I looked up what UK is doing ref pandemic preparedness and there is a new report from this March - unsurprisingly it is very wordy!! I found it hard to disentangle what they actually have planned.

No mention of Dido Harding who had over 30 billion for a track and trace system that didn,t work

That's a blast from the past paddy

I was worried the other day that I hadn't contributed a pound to the Church coffee morning.

The only thing that seemed to go right was the rollout of the vaccinations.

Clever there weren’t they? Amazing🙄

All PPE suppliers profiteered. There was an enormous unprecedented demand for PPE from all over the world, and limited supplies. Middlemen took risks; they offered multiples of normal prices - often having to pay up front - to convince manufacturers to disrupt their own schedules and produce the extra goods required. The middlemen then recouped those costs - plus their own risk premium - via selling to those of us who needed the stuff, now. It is what happens in such circumstances. The real failure was that of the people who are supposed to maintain the nation's strategic stockpile of PPE (including suitability and technical upgrades as well as condition), to be kept for just such eventualities, and, apparently, didn't.

There were coal miners' strikes during the World Wars. Same factors at play.

Amazing tales of corruption on here or maybe just plain stupidity. How on earth can Mone be allowed to get away with this and yet still apparently be a member of the House of Lords? Seems nowadays that an awful lot of people in positions of power are plain corrupt. Has this always been the case or is it just that facts are made more accessible to the public in these times?

Vintagewhine I totally agree with you. How can they get away with this!?

GrannyGravy13

A proportion of our business has always been and still is PPE

There were rumblings from mid February 2020, and procurement became increasingly difficult day on day.

Some not so scrupulous suppliers were flooding the market with sub standard and out of date products. Easy for those with 30 + years of experience to spot, not so easy when there was pressure from everywhere and everyone to jut get it…

For any government of any country it was a Catch 22 situation, did they buy whatever they could, did they stick with proven suppliers and hope their orders were fulfilled, or did they cast their buying net further afield.

There were factories trying desperately to remodel their production lines and procure raw products to produce what was needed.

Of course mistakes were made, and maybe there were some who deliberately set out to abuse the system for their own gain.

It was unprecedented, with little planning, hopefully the enquiry will nudge this and future governments into being ready for the next pandemic or crisis.

Well said. Hindsight is a wonderful thing. Many ( probably most ) PPE suppliers were profiteering at the time ss countries were desperate for supplies. Basically 'damned if you ordered, damned if you didn't '.

She never went anyway.

valdali

Not a Boris fan, but rigorous procurement processes take ages, and we had to have that PPE, like, next-day delivery.

Maybe asking his cronies was the lazy way to do it (& Boris always struck me as bad at the detail) but just maybe he thought that at such a time the companies chosen wouldn't stoop to profiteering.

Is this why the enquiry failed to find corruption? Because there was no tangible gain for those awarding the contracts? Which is a relief.

If procurement takes so long to achieve how do you account for the fact that one of the largest safety equipment companies in the country were ignored.
They made the call to the government but were ignored 🤬

www.hulldailymail.co.uk/news/hull-east-yorkshire-news/inside-story-how-arco-snubbed-7906386

Pippins6133

Vintagewhine I totally agree with you. How can they get away with this!?

Because that’s the way the system works irrespective of who’s in power.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.

But any country with a half decent government would have been planning for this for decades. My doctor OH had been saying for years that a pandemic was on the horizon and scientists knew this. It is not as if it were a surprise to them - they simply had not invested in the proper preparations and planning. And with the prevailing short-termism it is hard to persuade the public that this is where some of their taxes should be spent - maybe we have all learned now that prevention is a priority.

Luckygirl3

This was the level of government that we were suffering. We do well to remember this and ponder the ritual disposal of Starmer.

...under whose stewardship the country has fared even worse and in just two years. This has been my experience of Labour governments since the late 60s.

The real failure was that of the people who are supposed to maintain the nation's strategic stockpile of PPE (including suitability and technical upgrades as well as condition), to be kept for just such eventualities, and, apparently, didn't.

As I recall that job had been 'outsourced' to a private company by the tories.

Privatisation is turning out to be a bit of a failure, isn't it?

What really annoys me are the obvious double standards here regarding recovery of public funds. Like many retired civil servants my pension administration was outsourced years ago.
Couple of years ago I was overpaid and as soon as the wrong amount was paid into my bank I spent hours on the phone to MyCSP detailing why their calculations were wrong and asking them to check and sort it out before the next payment was made; I was called back and told that I was wrong and it was all as it should be, nothing to concern myself with etc, etc.
3 years later out of the blue I received a very curt letter telling me that I had been overpaid and must repay immediately. No ifs or buts , instalments would be considered but a bank transfer was preferable.
No mention of my earlier calls to them .
Writing elicited no response , they didn’t even reply to a letter from my MP. They decided to recover the £5000 by deductions from my pension, without asking, despite it being their error.

So the public purse is protected !

Pity the same zeal is not applied to recovery of the much larger sums involved here.

Who was the American woman who famously said ‘tax is for the little people’?
This feels that way.

Chocolatelovinggran - love how you worded this

At least Starmer would have held Cobra meetings and attended them as has been shown during his tenure.
Johnson was inept, ill prepared and indecisive. The writing was on the wall when we saw the images from Italy and out borders remained open.
It was money for mates and jobs for the boys hence the inadequate PEP being given to our health workers! Mone should have her title removed as she is undeserving of such an accolade. She has cheated us all and this is unforgivable.

PPE 🤦

I do wonder why the only "crook" who seems to being demonised is Mone. As previously mentioned others have benefited greatly, yet not being persuade, by the government or the mass media.
Could this be because she wasn't part of the "elite" but from a working class background? Yes, she was part of the con, seems to be the fall guy though.

Wow, Granny Gravy! So good to hear some sense on here. It was a scary time in a previously unknown situation. The government had to try whatever desperate measures they could, including going to the man “who knows a man”, just as we would if we suddenly needed a plumber!

orly

Luckygirl3

This was the level of government that we were suffering. We do well to remember this and ponder the ritual disposal of Starmer.

...under whose stewardship the country has fared even worse and in just two years. This has been my experience of Labour governments since the late 60s.

Nothing to do with party politics .... NO government since the war invested enough in disaster planning.

I think all.of this is an absolute National disgrace. With massive flagrant profiteering. And few people being taken to task. Capitalism at its worst.

But isn't that the way it has always been with the Tortes. And always will be. Enormous profits for their friends and cronies, huge corruption with no accountability.

Then a seat in the not fit for purpose,outdated and antiquated boys club. The House of Lords. With, of course the exception of Ms Money


The

Boris didn't bring about Brexit by himself - it was the result of a public vote!

Annewilko

I do wonder why the only "crook" who seems to being demonised is Mone. As previously mentioned others have benefited greatly, yet not being persuade, by the government or the mass media.
Could this be because she wasn't part of the "elite" but from a working class background? Yes, she was part of the con, seems to be the fall guy though.

Here are a few more of the questionable PPE suppliers from the link I posted this morning.

I don't think that Mone was singled out for any 'class' reasons. She was high profile and her husband was known for questionable business dealings. And a great deal of what they supplied was useless.

There was Ayanda Capital, a London-based asset investment business, registered in Mauritius for tax purposes. They were not, and have never been, a PPE manufacturer. Yet they still got a contract for £252 million to deliver PPE, of which at least £155 million might as well have been ground up and snorted by Michael Gove, because the kit they supplied “will not be used in the NHS”. It didn’t meet basic design requirements.

How did they get the gig? Andrew Mills, advisor to Liz Truss, told the UK government he had secured “exclusive rights to the full production capacity of a large factory in China to produce masks”, and offered to manage the Ayanda contract via his own family business, Prospermill. We have no idea how much Prospermill syphoned off from this deal, because just as the contracts were being agreed, Mills changed the legal status of Prospermill to that rare beast, an “unlimited company”, which meant he would never have to reveal details of his accounts.

We were now ten years into David Cameron’s transparency agenda, but civil servants seemed unwilling to question any of this because – in the words of the head of New Supplier Sourcing – Andrew Mills had “close ties to Department of International Trade, so wouldn’t be a good outcome”.

Ayanda Capital got the contract. Their profits increased 2,600 percent.

Let’s move on to Uniserve, a logistics company, which got a PPE contract worth more than £300 million after accidentally wandering into the VIP lane. They shouldn’t have been there, because they had no history of ever providing PPE; but by one of those amazing coincidences, they did happen to share an address with government minister Julia Lopez.

Uniserve then landed another £104 million contract, this time for storing PPE. You might be thinking that £2 million a month seems a lot of money to store something that didn’t need storing – it needed distributing, because there was an urgent global demand for it. Their profits increased 500 percent.

Pestfix got a contract for £350 million to supply PPE, and apparently the Tories thought this was money well-spent, despite the government’s own documents describing them as a company which “specialises in pest control products” and which had been made dormant in 2018.

Clandeboye Agencies describe themselves on Companies House as trading in the “wholesale of sugar, chocolate and sugar confectionery” – a sweet warehouse. It’s something of a puzzle why this business got given £108 million to provide PPE, seemingly “without advertising or competitive tendering process”.

Medpro was founded by two wealth management consultants working in an offshore tax haven and had a share value of just £2. It had also existed for just 2 days. One of the directors proudly boasted of his years working in “Yacht Management”. Tory peer Michelle Mone might have found it tricky to speak more than once during the two years she’d been claiming fees to attend the House of Lords, but she was pretty mouthy about getting a contract for Medpro. She miraculously recommended them as a PPE supplier five days before the company even existed. And then she went silent again, seemingly incapable of mentioning that both she and her husband were “part of the financial consortium that backed” Medpro. Before her intervention Medpro was worth £2. After, it was handed £200 million to deliver PPE.

Meller Designs, which makes home and beauty products for Marks & Spencer, is run by David Meller, a major Tory donor and director of small-government lobby group Policy Exchange. Meller was fortunate enough to have the phone number of Health Minister Lord Bethell, and put in a call. Bethell then recommended his department deal urgently with the bid for Meller’s business to provide PPE. Meller, the small government lobbyist, saw his business handed a not very small £148 million. He didn’t “win the bid”, because there was no competitive bidding process. He just made a call, and then £148 million was handed over.

You’d be forgiven for thinking this lot wanted small government for the same reason the Mafia wanted a small police force.

Some of the contracts beggar belief. Luxe Lifestyle was handed a £26 million PPE contract despite having no employees and being insolvent. Indica Ventures declared itself “dormant” in January, yet got a £48 million PPE contract in March, and reportedly never delivered a thing. A further £28 million went to a company that made shop furniture, which again, reportedly didn’t deliver any PPE.

Aventis Solutions had assets of just £332. That’s not a typo, it really was worth £332. The collection of bags-for-life in the cupboard under my sink is valued at more than £332. Aventis won a PPE contract worth £18 million.

A million quid went to a shoemaker in Bristol. For PPE. From a cobbler.

Even if those contracts were providing urgently needed PPE – and in many cases, they seemingly weren’t – the price we agreed to pay was often astonishing. Textile importer Jonathan Bennett had connections with the world’s biggest PPE manufacturers in China, who could provide millions of items. He approached the UK government, having agreed a price of £1.70 each for PPE masks. The government instead chose to give the contract to Ayanda Capital, with its close connections to Liz Truss, for £3.10 per mask.

A report from anti-corruption NGO Transparency International found one fifth of UK government contracts awarded in response to the pandemic raised a “red flag” for corruption.