The National Crime Agency has said it is “not scared” of lawyers acting for PPE Medpro, the company led by the Conservative peer Michelle Mone’s husband, Doug Barrowman, and is progressing an investigation into it “as fast as we can”.
The NCA is conducting a long-running investigation into suspected criminal offences committed in the procurement by PPE Medpro of £203m of government contracts to supply personal protective equipment during the Covid pandemic.
The contracts were awarded via the government’s “VIP lane”, which gave high priority to companies with political connections. The NCA said a full file had “not yet” been passed to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) in relation to any charges but hinted that conversations were taking place.
Responding to questions about the length of the investigation at a press conference, the agency’s director general of operations, Rob Jones, said: “There’s always conversations with the CPS about complex cases like that, but the full file submission to the CPS hasn’t gone ahead yet.”
When asked whether the NCA was scared of PPE Medpro’s lawyers, Jones said: “No. We’re not scared of drug barons’ lawyers in Colombia, so, trust me, we’re not scared of these either.”
Jones said they were making progress as fast as they could on the investigation. “We’ve put a lot of resource into the case and we will do everything that we need to move it forward so that a decision can be made on the case. It is an inherently complex case and that takes time.”
Assets controlled by Mone and Barrowman and worth about £75m were frozen or restrained under a court order obtained by the CPS last December.
Jones said that people should not read anything into the period of more than three years the case has taken to investigate, and that other cases of similar complexity had taken much longer.
When asked how many staff had been assigned to the case and whether it was, for example, 20 or five, Jones responded that it was “definitely more than five”, adding: “We’re working on that case as a priority in the agency. We’ll bring it to a conclusion as quickly as we can.”
Mone admitted last year that she had lied to the media by repeatedly denying that she was involved in PPE Medpro. In the same media interviews, Mone and Barrowman adamantly denied any criminal wrongdoing.
Their lawyer declined to comment.
