A company linked to Tory peer Michelle Mone must repay the Government almost £122 million for breaching a PPE contract to supply 25 million surgical gowns during the coronavirus pandemic, a High Court judge has ruled.

Baroness Mone – who rose to fame as the creator of the Ultimo bra company – has been embroiled in controversy for years over the PPE equipment her husband Doug Barrowman’s firm PPE Medpro supplied to the Government at the height of the pandemic.

A criminal investigation and a House of Lords inquiry are both ongoing.

The company won a lucrative contract to supply 25 million surgical gowns, allegedly after improper lobbying of the Government by the Baroness, without declaring an interest.

The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) sued, claiming the gowns were not sterile.

In her 87-page ruling, Mrs Justice Cockerill said today the gowns ‘were not, contractually speaking, sterile, or properly validated as being sterile’.

She said: ‘That means that they could not be used as sterile gowns in the NHS or elsewhere.’

PPE Medpro had claimed at trial the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) had ‘failed to mitigate’ its losses by trying to relabel the gowns to be used in the NHS.

But Mrs Justice Cockerill said: ‘This however was only really, even hypothetically, an option if the goods were sterile, such that they could properly be re-labelled or re-packaged.’

It was also found that while the DHSC had ‘failed to reject the goods effectively’, it could not sell the gowns, meaning it found itself ‘between a rock and a hard place’.

She said: ‘There was no realistic identifiable route to selling or deploying these gowns…Consequently DHSC is entitled to recover the cost of the gowns.’ 

Medpro claimed to have sterilised the gowns using radiation – but could not prove it had done so as required.

Among contaminants found on the gowns was an organism only discovered in 2017 and originating from a trench more than five miles beneath the surface of the Pacific ocean, north of New Guinea.

Another contaminant was previously documented in a blood sample in Sweden, and a third was first identified in the Mojave desert in California.

And Medpro’s claim that they gowns could have been put to other uses, or sold, was dismissed, as there was no evidence of any demand for 25 million non-sterile gowns.

The DHSC failed only in a call to also be paid the £8m of taxpayers’ money spent on storing the useless gowns.

Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who has been leading work within government to claw back money lost during the Covid-19 pandemic, welcomed the judgment.

She said: ‘We want our money back. We are getting our money back. And it will go where it belongs – in our schools, NHS and communities.’

Mr Barrowman blasted the judgment as a ‘travesty of justice’.

He said: ‘Today, a travesty of justice took place following the judgment of Lady Justice Cockerill.

‘She gave the DHSC (Department of Health and Social Care) an Establishment win despite the mountain of evidence in court against such a judgment.

‘Her judgment bears little resemblance to what actually took place during the month-long trial, where PPE Medpro convincingly demonstrated that its gowns were sterile.

‘This judgment is a whitewash of the facts and shows that justice was being seen to be done, where the outcome was always certain for the DHSC and the Government. This case was simply too big for the Government to lose.’

Baroness Mone yesterday posted a message on X claiming that the Government was ‘scapegoating’ her and her husband Doug Barrowman.

Baroness Mone, 53, said: ‘This case was never about gowns or money. It has always been about politics and blame-shifting, a way to cover up the Government’s disastrous £10 billion PPE write-off. 

‘Doug and I have been deliberately scapegoated and vilified in an orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement.

‘The Government decided to make us the poster couple for the PPE scandal, a convenient distraction to take the blame off them.’