Nigel Farage has reacted to Baroness Mone admitting she lied about PPE deals but says he does not believe it is the biggest scandal to come out of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Speaking on his GB News show he said: “Baroness Michelle Mone is all over the front pages of our national newspapers today.
“She gave a big interview to the BBC yesterday, following on from a few press reports in the last couple of weeks, in which she says: ‘Look, I didn’t tell the truth. Myself, my husband Doug, we were involved with a firm called MedPro. We previously said we were not.’
Nigel Farage discusses Baroness Mone
GB News
“And it turns out from the £200 million pounds worth of orders they got from the government; they made a profit of about £60 million. And there’s now today been rather a war of words . So on the face of it, this looks like the great scandal to come out of the pandemic, but folks, it really isn’t. And here’s why.
“At the start of the pandemic, the Department of Health were desperately short of PPE across seven major categories. For example, sterilized gowns, we were down to a supply of one day’s stock. So during that period when the pandemic kicked in from February to July 2020, the department purchased – wait for it – five years worth of PPE.
“Up to £10 billion worth of PPE purchased has been written off, destroyed or lost.
“The prices they paid for it were about five times what the prices had been during the pandemic itself. And whichever way you look at this, we had PPE stored at 70 locations over the country.
“Some of it was still being stored in China, that we were actually paying £400 million pounds per annum simply in storage fees. £10 billion worth of our money was literally wasted.
“About £3 billion of the PPE your money went on, actually got used.
“How could the government have over ordered on this scale? How on earth could they have wasted up to £10 billion of money?
“There were over 14,000 companies that applied for PPE contracts, many people making very, very big profits out of it.
“And yes, of course there was a high priority lane, where those that were known to government ministers had a much better chance of getting the orders and, of course, Baroness Mone was a part of that.
“I believe the real scandal of this pandemic is that the government over-ordered PPE, most of which, after a year in storage, wasn’t fit for purpose anyway.
“The real scandal is they wasted £10 billion of our money and the inquiry that is going on will not be discussing procurement until 2025.”
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