An £18million office complex run by Michelle Mone is linked to the same network of companies at the centre of a Covid PPE scandal. The bra baroness is now being urged to explain if the Neospace site in Aberdeen was funded by public money from UK Government Covid contracts.
A Sunday Mail investigation into the site’s ownership has discovered how those running under-fire PPE Medpro are also involved with the luxury office complex, which was launched by Mone months after she is alleged to have secretly received £29million in profit from the Government PPE contracts.
Calls are now being made for an investigation into the funding of the office complex. Ian Murray, Labour MP and shadow Scottish secretary, said: “We need an investigation into whether the funds from PPE Medpro were used to pay for this project. The public deserve answers now.
“The Michelle Mone scandal is still unfolding and every new story casts more doubt on the integrity of the current Government. All the Prime Minister can do is say he’s shocked but the public want their money back. We have been given no answers and nobody has taken responsibility for this.
"If these allegations are proven true, Michelle Mone must resign and be stripped of her title.” SNP MP Kirsty Blackman, who represents Aberdeen North, said: “The public deserve answers on exactly how much money she and her family have made from these contracts, what they did with that money and what tax arrangements were made.
"The Westminster government is broken and rife with cronyism.” Mone, who has taken a leave of absence from the Lords, is under intense scrutiny after her husband’s links to PPE Medpro emerged. Medpro was awarded more than £200million in public money to provide PPE during the pandemic after the Tory peer recommended the company and it was fast-tracked through Westminster’s VIP lane.
Mone and her husband Douglas Barrowman publicly boasted about Neospace, the £18million co-working complex they opened in June 2021. The Ultimo founder said the project had been her and Barrowman’s attempt to reinvent the modern working environment, with the 22,000sq ft facility having a golf simulator, gym, sauna and juice bar.
Earlier this year the business was given permission by Aberdeen City Council to sell alcohol on the premises until 11pm. Eight months before Neospace launched, Mone and her children are alleged to have benefited from £29million of profit from the PPE Medpro Government contract via an offshore trust called the Keristal Trust.
According to documents obtained by the Guardian, Barrowman is alleged to have received £65million in profit from the PPE deal in September 2020, before distributing the funds to other accounts, including the Keristal Trust. Despite being the public faces of the company, neither Mone nor Barrowman are listed as directors of Neospace on Companies House.
Instead, two people based in the tax haven Isle of Man control the Neospace firm – Anthony Page and Voirrey Claire Coole. Coole and Page were both directors for PPE Medpro. Page is also a director at Knox House Trust, part of the Knox Group of companies founded by Mone’s husband Barrowman.
Based beside the River Dee, the Neospace building was bought by Barrowman’s firm Aston Property Ventures, which is also part of the Knox Group. PPE Medpro and Neospace also share the same registered office address in Blackfriars House, Manchester, along with the registered address of Knox Group.
Documents show Neospace (Aberdeen) Limited was set up in February 2020, with Page and Coole as directors, while PPE Medpro was set up in May 2020 with the same directors. Around this time Mone was sending emails to the Cabinet Office saying her “team in Hong Kong” was able to get huge volumes of face masks and asked if the Government wanted them.
In June Medpro was given its first UK Government contract to supply face masks and in September Barrowman is alleged to have received £65million in profit from the contracts, before putting £29million in a trust of which Mone and her children were beneficiaries.
The National Crime Agency is reported to be investigating the links between Mone and PPE Medpro but refused to say if it was looking at Neospace as part of the probe or confirm if it was investigating Mone at all when asked by the Sunday Mail. A spokeswoman said the organisation “does not confirm or deny the existence of an investigation”.
Neospace launched in June last year, with Mone and Barrowman telling how they had invested £18million into
the project. Mone waxed lyrical about the new venture, which was described as the first in an “international chain of workplaces” under the Neospace banner. The building was bought by Barrowman in 2013 for about £14million.
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At the time it was the largest building in the couple’s commercial property portfolio, with Mone claiming their Scottish property portfolio was worth about £100million in investment. She said they had picked Aberdeen to launch the co-working space as “we are both Scottish and we looked at the biggest building we had in Scotland”.
The peer added that she used to visit the city regularly before the launch of Ultimo and “Aberdeen and Glasgow were my most profitable areas”. Admitting that it might have seemed like a strange location for such an investment, she said: “A lot of people have been saying, ‘Why are you investing in Aberdeen?’
"The oil trade is going down and they are saying that would be the last place some of our friend entrepreneurs would invest in.” She said the investment to open Neospace had been “a gamble” but she was confident “before you know it, it’ll be oversold”. Mone hinted at more ventures with “other buildings we have in Aberdeen” too, although nothing has been announced since.
Lawyers representing Mone and Barrowman have repeatedly denied the couple are “connected in any way” to PPE Medpro, saying they had “no role or function in PPE Medpro nor in the process by which contracts were awarded to PPE Medpro”. Mone, Neospace, Aston Property Ventures and the Knox Group were all contacted for comment but did not respond.
