Scots firm which donated to the Tories won Covid PPE contracts

A £14m deal in April 2020 to provide eye protection and respirators was given to the Scottish firm - has now been confirmed, four months after Boris Johnson said that details of the contracts had been published and were "on the record".

Health minister Edward Argar in March, told the House of Commons that the PM had "spoken accurately".

The Scottish contract has been quietly published alongside 40 other PPE contracts with a total value of £4.2 billion.

The Globus (Shetland) confirmation comes 14 months after the contract was awarded and four months after the contract had ended.

The government is required by law to publish a "contract award notice" within 30 days of the awarding any contracts for public goods or services worth more than £120,000.

The Good Law Project which has been tracking the Covid-19 government direct contract spend said: "Something is very wrong indeed."

According to the High Court in London, in March there were 100 Covid contracts that had not been published when Boris Johnson told MPs they were "on the record for everyone to see".

In February, a judge ruled the health secretary Matt Hancock had acted unlawfully by not publishing contracts in the required timeframe.

Ministers said remaining contracts would be published as soon as possible.

The Department for Health and Social Care struck deals worth hundreds of millions of pounds during the coronavirus pandemic.

The newly revealed contracts were awarded by Supply Chain Coordination Ltd (SCCL) a procurement company up in 2018 and overseen by the Department of Health and Social Care as part of a drive to deliver savings over a five year period.

Globus (Shetland) Limited, headed by 47-year-old chief executive Haraldur Agustsson made two donations of £50,000 to the Tories each in 2016 then followed up with four donations totalling £113,168 the following year.

According to official records, in 2018 the firm put £52,500 into Conservative Party coffers and in 2019 it donated another £100,000, made in two instalments.

Scottish Labour finance spokesman Daniel Johnson said: “This is yet another example of Tory sleaze.

“Time and time again during this pandemic, the Tories and the SNP have played fast and loose with the nation’s finances.

READ MORE: Firm awarded £10m Test and Trace contract put staff out on furlough

“Both governments should have the book thrown at them for their dodgy deals.

“The people of Scotland deserve so much better.”

The latest £14m Globus (Shetland) award included £10,328,396.22 for respirators and £3,893,200 for eye protection.

A further £423,464.17 contract was made to the Scottish firm for 6N nitrile examination gloves and was also confirmed 14 months after it was awarded.

A £93,709,400 contract was given to Globus (Shetland) in July, 2020 for the supply of FFP3 face masks which runs to September, this year - which was confirmed four months after it was agreed.

There is no suggestion of impropriety on the part of either company or their directors.

Its sister company Dumfriesshire-based Alpha Solway was also awarded a £53m contract by the Scottish Government for PPE, enabling it to expand and create more than 200 jobs in Annan, Dumfriesshire.

The contract was announced by the First Minister during a pandemic briefing in August and was for the manufacture of 232 million surgical masks and two million visors for NHS Scotland.

The biggest winners of the most recently published SCCL PPE contracts were Full Support Healthcare which landed a £1.8bn deal including eye protectors, face masks, respirators and gowns.

Also confirmed the past week was a contract award to Girvan-based Guardian Surgical which received a £312m PPE deal in April 2020.

According to the procurers in the £14m contract award, it was made without going out to tender because there was an urgent need due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

It refers to the "extreme urgency" over issuing the awards "brought about by events unforeseeable for the contracting authority..."

"The use of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) is critical in safeguarding the health and lives of the healthcare professionals treating patients with COVID-19. Delays in procuring the PPE, poses a risk to life of those on the front line and the likelihood of significantly increased death toll," the contract award justification stated.

"In March the NHS experienced severe shortages of PPE, modelling based the trajectory of other European countries forecast the need for significant and extremely rapid increase in the UK PPE capacity. Similar shortfalls in PPE stocks were identified globally. There was immense demand for PPE, requiring the need to actively seek and create new supply chains rapidly to meet that demand. In these circumstances, a procurement following the usual timescales under the PCR 2015, including accelerated options, was impossible.

"PPE manufacturers and supply chains were under immediate and unprecedented global pressure to provide products. A delay in engaging with the market by running a usual procurement process ran the risk of failing to acquire the necessary stock of PPE equipment and presenting a significant risk to life.

READ MORE: Coronavirus Scotland: PPE stocks close to running out in April 2020

"The purchasing of PPE was identified as strictly necessary to meet anticipated demand. It is responding to COVID-19 immediately because of public health risks presenting a genuine emergency.

"There was no time to run an accelerated procurement under the open, restricted or competitive procedures with negotiation that would secure products within the required timescales."

It adds: "The situation is not attributable to the contracting authority: It has not done anything to cause or contribute to the need for extreme urgency."

In the High Court in February, Mr Justice Chamberlain said the public were entitled to see who the money was going to, what it was being spent on and how the relevant contracts were awarded.

He ruled that Health Secretary Matt Hancock acted unlawfully when his department failed to publish award notices for contracts it had agreed during the Covid pandemic within 30 days of them being signed.

The judge also found the health secretary had acted unlawfully by failing to comply with the government's own policy of publishing the contracts within 20 days of them being awarded.

Challenged about the ruling in the House of Commons on Februar 22, Mr Johnson said: "All the details are on the record."

The prime minister added: "The contracts are there on the record for everybody to see."

But three days later, in a written legal response to the Good Law Project, government lawyers admitted 100 contracts for suppliers and services relating to Covid-19 signed before October 7 had yet to be published.

It comes a matter of days after the Herald revealed that UK ministers used a pandemic research contract deemed "unlawful" by the High Court while at the centre of a government "institutionalised cronyism" row to carry out work on attitudes to the Union in Scotland.

Court documents seen by the Herald showed an urgent request to test attitudes to the Union was made by the office of Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove - under the cover of the Covid-19 contract given to Public First, which was meant to inform "vital" advice to shape the UK government's pandemic response.

It emerged that in July, last year, services provided by Public First under a £560,000 Covid pandemic contract were extended to cover what was described as "qualitative research into EU exit topics and themes, re-building the economy following the Covid-19 crisis and attitudes to the UK Union".

The SNP confronted Boris Johnson with the revelations last week and called for an inquiry into what it called "misuse of public funds" by Tory ministers on conducting "political research" through the Covid contract.

High Court judge Mrs Justice O’Farrell ruled that the June 5 decision to award the contract to Public First - run by close allies of Mr Gove and Mr Cummings - "gave rise to apparent bias and was unlawful".

According to the judgement, the award of the contract was made by a letter from Mr Gove.

A Globus Group spokesman said: “We are proud of the role Globus Group played in meeting the UK’s needs during this time of national emergency. In addition to our work with the DHSC, last year Alpha Solway, a Globus company based in Annan, was awarded a contract by Nicola Sturgeon’s SNP-led government to provide more than 230 million masks and 2 million visors for NHS Scotland.

“As the biggest UK based PPE company with a long history of innovation that has been helping to protect people for over 30 years, we were able to quickly re-purpose our existing facilities and significantly expand our sites. We are committed to manufacturing 75% of our products in the UK, have opened four new factories in Southern Scotland and North West England and we’re creating more than 1,000 new jobs.

“We have entered into a pioneering public-private investment partnership with SOSE [South of Scotland Enterprise] which will create hundreds of jobs and our response to the pandemic was recognised by Audit Scotland in their briefing on PPE which used Alpha Solway as a case study."

A UK government spokesman said there was no connection between donations to individual political parties, and the awarding of contracts by the government.

 “Decisions on whether to award contracts for PPE are taken by officials and are based on a stringent process that includes whether the offer had cleared eight previous checks including clinical acceptability and financial due diligence," said the spokesman.

“These checks are taken extremely seriously and ministers have no role in this process.

“Since the start of the pandemic we have delivered over 11 billion items of PPE to protect our frontline workers. As the NAO report recognised, all NHS providers they audited were able to get the equipment they needed in time.”