This week came word of at least £156m of taxpayers’ money wasted on 50 million face masks deemed unsuitable for the NHS. They were bought from a private equity firm through a company that had no track record of producing personal protective equipment – or indeed anything for that matter – and that had a share capital of just £100. But this company, Prospermill, had a crucial asset. It was co-owned by one Andrew Mills, adviser to the government, staunch Brexiteer and cheerleader for international trade secretary, Liz Truss.
Somehow Prospermill managed to persuade the government to part with £252m, boasting that it had secured exclusive rights over a PPE factory in China. Just one problem. The masks it produced use ear loops, when only masks tied at the head are judged by the government to be suitable for NHS staff. If the government wanted to spend £156m on masks for the nation’s kids to play doctors and nurses, this was a great deal. But in the fight against a pandemic, it was useless.
And then there was this incident:
This week the housing secretary Robert Jenrick was asked about his encounter with Richard Desmond at a Tory fundraising dinner last November, at which Desmond showed the cabinet minister a video of the housing development he wanted to build. Jenrick said he wished he “hadn’t been sat next to a developer at an event and I regret sharing text messages with him afterwards”, which rather glossed over the key fact: namely, that Jenrick promptly rushed through a decision on the project, the speed of which allowed Desmond’s company to avoid paying roughly £40m in tax to the local council. That move was later designated “unlawful”, and Jenrick was forced to overturn his decision.
It would be nice to think that episode was a one-off, but it’s hard to do so when developers have given £11m in donations to the Conservatives since Johnson arrived in Downing Street just one year ago.
Big Money has found its way into the inner sanctum of the Johnson government:
A political consultancy firm with strong ties to both [Dominic] Cummings and Michael Gove managed to win an £840,000 contract without any open tendering process at all. Public First is a small research company, but it is run by James Frayn, an anti-EU comrade of Cummings going back two decades, and his wife Rachel Wolf, the former Gove adviser who co-wrote the Tory manifesto for last year’s election. The government says it could skip the competitive tendering stage because emergency regulations applied, thanks to Covid. Except the government itself recorded some of Public First’s work as related to Brexit (it now says this was an accounting anomaly and that all the work related to the pandemic).
This kind of political corruption is everywhere -- here, south of the border, and in the UK. It's a great time for Big Money.
Image: uldissprogis.com
4 comments:
It's global warming Owen. Countries with solid democratic institutions are turning into banana republics. We're told this has nothing to do all the economic gains in the last 40 years going to a tiny fraction of the population who dodge taxes on their "earnings." That leaves global warming and I expect to see banana plantations popping up in southern Ontario.
Cap
You may be on to something, Cap. Perhaps the warming planet is the cause of a pandemic that targets human brains. In the end, they meltdown.
The stench of corruption and cronyism extends to Johnson's recent appointments to the House of Lords, Owen. https://www.thestar.com/news/world/europe/2020/07/31/uks-johnson-names-brother-and-brexiteers-to-house-of-lords.html
He's keeping it in his extended family, Lorne. It's all about scratching backs -- the right backs.
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