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Since the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, Byline Times and The Citizens have found that 57 contracts – worth some £944 million – have been awarded to 15 companies with directors, or people with controlling interests over these companies, who have donated £12 million to the Conservative Party.
Byline Times and The Citizens have exclusively exposed the contracts awarded to 12 out of these 15 companies.
Our ongoing investigation reported, in February, that COVID-related contracts worth £881 million had been awarded to donors that had given £8.1 million to the Conservative Party. However, just a month on, we have uncovered a further seven links to contract-winning Conservative donors.
The Government’s spending surged in the wake of the pandemic in March 2020. In the months that followed – as the Prime Minister went into and then left intensive care, and his chief aide Dominic Cummings took a drive to Barnard Castle to test his eyesight – healthcare workers raised concerns about shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE). Reports emerged of NHS staff being asked to treat COVID-19 patients without protection, amid a desperate scramble to source masks, gloves and coveralls.
Emergency powers were quickly implemented in response. The argument was made that the Government should be able to source PPE and other health equipment unshackled from the protocols of the normal procurement process. Contracts no longer had to undergo a rigorous tender process and a ‘VIP fast-track’ system of procurement was put in place. As these checks and balances lifted, questions were raised about a number of firms awarded contracts that had links to the Government and the Conservative Party.
At the time of writing, our investigation has logged more than 2,000 contract awards and counting and, within them, lie ever-rising concerns about the handling of taxpayers’ money. Indeed, we have found that one-third of contracts were awarded through emergency procurement without tender, and 77% were not published within the legal time limit of 30 days.
There is no suggestion that the companies did anything wrong or that they are unsuitable suppliers of PPE. Rather, the Government incubated this system, awarded the contracts and has staunchly defended its actions. If there has been a great procurement crisis, it has been state-sanctioned.
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Spring 2020
Softcat won the first of what was to be £16.2 million in COVID-related contracts at the very beginning of the pandemic. Businesswoman Vin Murria is a director of the company and has donated £125,000 to the Conservative Party since 2019 through her company VM.AV Corporate Services Ltd. Softcat also boasts Lord John Nash as an ex-director and current shareholder. Lord Nash is a Conservative peer and non-executive director at the Cabinet Office. He and his wife have donated nearly £667,000 to the Conservative Party in recent years.
Computacenter, co-founded by Sir Philip Hulme, was the next in line. The IT firm began to rack up what would become more than £200 million in contracts to supply school children with devices as part of the ‘Get Help With Technology’ programme – which intends to supply laptops, tablets and Wi-Fi devices to children learning from home during the pandemic. These contracts were largely exposed by Byline Times.
Prior to the 2019 General Election, Philip Hulme’s wife, Janet, donated £100,000 to the Conservative Party’s war chest. In 2013, Philip Hulme himself donated £10,000 to the then Conservative MP Nick Herbert, who sat in the House of Commons from 2005 to 2019. On 15 November 2019 – a day after Janet Hulme’s donation – an individual called George Hulme also gave £50,000 to the Conservative Party, though it is unclear whether they are related.
Hulme told Private Eye that he was “proud” to be part of “this vital programme to support the educational needs of some of the most disadvantaged young people”. The company, which posts annual revenues of £5 billion, has long worked with the Government but, in the past year, Computacenter’s shares have increased by 66.6%.
That same month, March 2020, saw the first contract awarded to Efficio, which has accumulated contracts worth £6 million during the pandemic so far. The company, which describes itself as “the world’s largest procurement consultancy”, was formerly overseen by Livingbridge – an investment company controlled by Oluwole ‘Wol’ Kolade, who also sits on the board of NHS Improvement with ‘Test and Trace’ chair Baroness Dido Harding. Kolade has donated £678,000 to the Conservative Party.
Efficio would not comment on the specifics of the awarded contracts but described Livingbridge as “a minority investor in our business”. In February, Livingbridge announced that it has now agreed to sell its stake in Efficio to the company’s management team. A spokesperson added: “We are proud to partner with colleagues in the public sector and of the work we have done together during this period of unprecedented national challenge.”
A month later, in April, Scott Fletcher’s cloud computing company ANS Group was awarded a £2.5 million deal for supporting the Test and Trace operation. The firm’s parent company – Project Daytona – has donated more than £240,000 to the Conservative Party.
This was also the month when a horse-racing friend of Health and Social Care Secretary Matt Hancock was awarded a £14.4 million contract for the supply of PPE, as revealed by Byline Times. CH&L Limited was incorporated just a few months before the contract was awarded, owned by Frances Stanley, whose husband had donated £5,000 directly to Hancock in June 2019. After the contract was published almost a year later, Stanley admitted to Byline Times that she had been unable to fulfil the contract and had returned the money.
“We had wanted to help source PPE at a time when the country urgently needed supplies and so put forward a detailed proposal to DHSC,” Stanley said. “This proposal was accepted and a deposit was paid by DHSC. However, due to unforeseen logistical circumstances, we weren’t able to help and the deposit was returned in full to DHSC. I had planned to donate any profits to a local charity. At no point did I ever talk to Matt Hancock about our plans to help, only DHSC purchasing officials involved in the process.”
Amid the scramble for PPE, firms rushed to China to find scarce goods. This brought its own problems. As Byline Times revealed, the Government purchased face masks manufactured by a Chinese company that used state-imposed Uyghur Muslim labour in its factories.
The owner of P1F Medical, who provided more than £60 million of PPE to the Government, described to Byline Times the chaos of procuring equipment during the early months of the pandemic. “Those factories were almost like fish markets,” he said “in how other countries and other companies were trying to negotiate.”
Our ongoing investigation has also recently discovered that, at the same time, two PPE contracts were awarded to MDS Healthcare worth some £2.5 million. New records show that it subsequently donated £5,000 to the Conservative Party in July 2020, a couple of months after its contracts were awarded. The firm maintains that the donation was entirely unrelated to its PPE work during the pandemic.
Summer 2020
In the UK, the Government was desperate to return things to normal. On 4 July, England was ‘re-opened’ on what was dubbed “Super Saturday”.
At the same time, Meller Designs – which had previously supplied home and beauty products to high-street retailers – won its first PPE contract. The f