PPE Medpro, which is linked to Michelle Mone, appears to have made huge profit on 25m gowns that were never used by NHS
PPE the government bought for £122m from a
company linked to the Tory peer Michelle Mone was purchased from the
Chinese manufacturer for just £46m.
The
extraordinary profits apparently made by PPE Medpro and its partners in
the supply chain are revealed in documents leaked to the Guardian,
including contracts and an inspection report for sterile surgical gowns
supplied by the firm.
Despite being bought at the start of the pandemic and delivered in 2020, the 25m gowns were never used by the NHS after government officials rejected them following an inspection.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has for months been seeking to recover money from PPE Medpro
through a mediation process. The firm claims it is entitled to keep the
money, arguing that DHSC “agents” approved the gowns after inspection.
PPE Medpro’s contract to supply 25m sterile surgical gowns was one of two awarded to the company after it was processed through a government “VIP lane” for politically connected companies.
The company was first entered into the government’s high-priority lane after Mone contacted two cabinet ministers – Michael Gove and Theodore Agnew – in May 2020 to say that PPE could be sourced from “my team in Hong Kong”. …
…
In January, the Guardian revealed that a tranche of leaked files appear to show both Mone and her husband, the Isle of Man financier Douglas Barrowman, were secretly involved in PPE Medpro’s
business. The leak included WhatsApp messages from June 2020 in which
Mone, texting from a private jet, appears to be discussing the required
sizes of the gowns, and details regarding the DHSC’s purchase order or
“PO” process. …
… That inspection appears to have taken place in
China, before the gowns were then transported to the UK. The Guardian
has seen a leaked 20-page report of an internal supply chain inspection
apparently carried out before that, in late August, at a factory in
China’s Jiangsu province.It contains photos
from inside the factory showing workers in casual clothes at sewing
machines beside large piles of blue gowns, some trailing on the floor.
The packing area is cramped and dimly lit.
Photographs
show that PPE Medpro’s gowns were packed into boxes at the factory with
“sterile surgical gown” printed on the side in capital letters. Each
gown was also wrapped in a clear plastic bag, with labels inserted
inside.The labels in the inspection report
bear PPE Medpro’s name and logo, technical specifications and
instructions for use for the “sterile surgical gowns”. However, they do
not display a certification number from a “notified body” such as the
British Standards Institute (BSI) that would usually be expected to
confirm surgical gowns were sterile in accordance with regulations.
A
lawyer for PPE Medpro did not dispute that no notified body had
certified the gowns as sterile, but suggested that was not required
because the gowns had been approved under “an equivalent technical
solution” that meant that “the normal rules do not apply”.
They suggested PPE Medpro was exempted from
standard rules because its products were supplied under “very
specifically and precisely agreed processes” and “in accordance with the
annexures to the contract”.
The Guardian has
also been leaked what appears to be a draft label for PPE Medpro’s gowns
that did include a BSI number. It is not known when the label was
designed or by whom, and it does not appear to have been used as the
final label.
It looks largely identical to the
final label seen in the leaked inspection report, except for the
display of the number – 2797 – which is the official identification mark
for BSI’s Netherlands office.
A spokesperson
for BSI said that it had never authorised PPE Medpro to use that
certification number and had now reported the incident to the
Netherlands regulator, the Health and Youth Care Inspectorate (IGJ): “We can confirm that PPE Medpro is not a client of BSI. We have reported the misuse of our notified body number to IGJ.” …
tl;dr: shiny, bleached tory cunt rips off UK to the tune of
£76m, by selling them unsterile PPE gowns during the plague. Lies ensue.
A spacecraft that just skimmed the Sun has delivered the
highest-resolution image yet of our home star’s full disk and
atmosphere.
On 7 March, the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter
took the image with its Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI) when it was at a
distance of just 75 million kilometers (46.6 million miles) – half the
distance between Earth’s average orbit and the Sun.
At that distance, the spacecraft needed to take 25 different images,
each a nearly 10-minute exposure, which had to be stitched together into
a mosaic to construct the full image. The result is a 9,148 by 9,112
pixel extravaganza. That’s 83 million pixels of solar magnificence.
The
result is incredible: a fully zoomable image that allows you to pore
over fine details of the solar surface and corona (atmosphere),
including several solar ‘prominences’ around the edge of the disk that
sometimes erupt and eject massive amounts of plasma into space. [Image on website.] …
… The EUI is just one of the spacecraft’s instruments. When studying
the Sun, it’s helpful to look at a range of wavelengths, since different
atoms emit light differently. The Spectral Imaging of the Coronal
Environment (SPICE) instrument is designed for this granular detail;
while the EUI was imaging the Sun, so too was SPICE collecting mosaics
of its own.
SPICE collected data in four extreme ultraviolet
wavelengths: 102.5 nanometers, emitted by hydrogen at 10,000 degrees
Celsius (18,000 degrees Fahrenheit); 97.7 nanometers, emitted by carbon
at 32,000 degrees Celsius; 103.2 nanometers, emitted by oxygen at
320,000 degrees Celsius; and 77.0 nanometers, emitted by neon at 630,000
degrees Celsius.
The hydrogen image is the first full image of
the Sun of its kind in 50 years, and absolutely the best, so you can
guarantee solar scientists are going to be bouncing in their seats to
study it. …
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