Norpig wrote:Mone actually said she rang up Gove and offered her services so if that's the case then it wasn't actually awarded by civil servants was it? i know there was a panic on but it wasn't vetted properly was it?
Seems to me the VIP lane was just a way for the Government to award contracts to the chosen few, i'm sure you'll disagree with me though Sluffy.
I've wrote about the VIP lane numerous times - fwiw it was set up by the Civil Servants NOT the politicians AND was available to ALL MP's including Labour ones.
The idea was to sort the wheat out from the chaff because basically all that was wanted was companies with existing contracts in China to supply a huge amount of PPE at extremely short notice.
At the end of the day iirc there were only 9 Tory MPs, Ministers, Lords, etc who ended up recommending companies that were awarded PPE contracts via the VIP lane.
90% of the referrals through the VIP lane were rejected by the civil servants as being unsuitable in some way or other.
In fact more contracts were awarded to companies who did not come via the VIP lane but by the normal way.
As for Mone and Gove, it doesn't work that way.
Mone contact Gove who was in charge of the Cabinet Office at the time but he simply referred her to one of his deputies...
In one key email, sent on 8 May 2020, Mone proposed supplying large quantities of PPE face masks to the government, saying they could be sourced through “my team in Hong Kong”.The email was sent to Theodore Agnew, a fellow Tory peer who was at the time a Cabinet Office minister responsible for procurement. Mone copied Gove in to the email, telling Agnew that Gove had asked her to “urgently” contact himHe in turn referred it on again to another department dealing with the PPE contracts...
Agnew replied from his personal email address, copying in the government email address of his private secretary. “Michelle, Thank you for your kind offer. I am forwarding this into the appropriate PPE workstream with Dept of Health. They will ask you some basic questions on the details of the offer and then hopefully progress it from there. Best wishes Theodore.”
One of his staff then emailed a Covid PPE “priority appraisals” mailbox, asking them to “pick up with Baroness Mone”. The staff member added the words “VIA LORD AGNEW” and “VIP” to the subject field.[You must be registered and logged in to see this link.]Lord Agnew now picks up the tale from his tweet yesterday
[You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]You will note that her Declaration of Interest has been checked in her Lords disclosure and NOTHING about this was there!!!
You will also notice that despite her claims there is nothing in her correspondence to either Gove or Agnew about her having an interest.
And fwiw she's already LIED multiple times that she had NO interest in the company in question!!!
So to answer you -
YES the contract
WAS awarded solely by the civil service team.
YES she
WAS properly vetted and her prior Declaration of Interests were searched and her interests in the company
WERE NOT declared.
and
NO the VIP lane was
NOT the governments way of handing out contracts to their mates.
Think about it this way, it is coming up for FOUR YEARS now since these contracts were awarded and in all that time and despite everybody and their dog trying to prove such corruption not a single piece of evidence, no whistle blower or any court case has ever been found or taken place.
There most be hundreds and hundreds of people involved both from the government/civil service side and the contractors, their employees and all their family's and friends, so the chances of keeping this absolutely secret is zero.
Common sense if nothing else would suggest it is more likely that nothing actually did happen but you like many, many others simply WANT it to be TRUE and would rather believe a 'conspiracy' story than the practicality of a mass cover up by hundreds if not thousands of people involving millions and millions of pounds!!!
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