Conservative peer claims he lobbied for Covid testing contract

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Conservative peer claims he lobbied for Covid testing contract

Matt Hancock, a conservative peer, has claimed in a series of his diaries that he lobbyed on behalf of a company bidding to supply Covid tests during the Pandemic.

The former health secretary claimed that Lady Mone made wild accusations about the procurement process, intimating that the company she was helping, which is not named, was suffering unfairly.

I read the message again, stunned, reads a part of Hancock's diary, which is being serialised in the Daily Mail. It looked that way. The Guardian revealed last month that Mone and her children secretly received 29 m from the profits of a PPE business that was awarded large government contracts.

PPE Medpro secured contracts worth more than 200 m in 2020, weeks after Mone recommended the company to Tory cabinet minister Michael Gove and his then deputy Theodore Agnew.

The Tory peer contacted him in June last year about lateral flow tests, which he said relate to a separate bid for business connected to Mone.

Baroness Michelle Mone sent me an extraordinarily aggressive email complaining that a company she s helping isn't getting the multimillion-pound contracts it deserves, he wrote. She claims the firm, which makes lateral flow test kits, has had a dreadful time trying to cut through red tape and needs urgent help before it comes out in the media. She threatened that I am going to blow this all wide open. According to the Mail, Hancock said Mone complained to the Mail that a US test manufacturer, Innova, had secured a monopoly position by winning several contracts.

She seemed to have worked herself into a frenzy and was throwing around wild accusations at the end of the message. It is more than the usual red tape, incompetence and bureaucracy. That is expected! There is corruption here at the highest levels. She ended by urging me to intervene to prevent the next bombshell being dropped on the government This, Hancock added, felt like a threat. In the diary, Hancock wrote that he found out that the company for which she was lobbying had not passed necessary tests to win contracts, and he did not reply to aggressive peers representing commercial clients Mone's representatives were contacted for comment. The Mail said they had refused to make a statement.

At the weekend, new details emerged about the pressure Mone appears to have put ministers under after approaching them on behalf of PPE Medpro.

As previously revealed by the Guardian, Mone wrote to Gove, then Cabinet Office Minister and Lord Agnew, who told them PPE could be sourced from my team in Hong Kong, when she felt that the government was taking too long to respond, and that Agnew was pushed via email and telephone to speed up the process. A source familiar with the so-called VIP procurement channel said she was rude, abrasive and bullying. Her hectoring tone was very irritating. A lawyer for Mone said last month there were a number of reasons why our client can't comment on these issues, and she is under no duty to do so. A lawyer who represents both PPE Medpro and Mone's husband, Douglas Barrowman, who appears to have received profits from government contracts, said a continuing investigation limited what his clients could say on these matters. They said that there were a lot of inaccuracy in the portrayal of the alleged facts and a number of them are completely wrong.