I have friends who think they’ve achieved something during lockdown. They’ve put up shelves and read Dickens. They’ve fact-checked The Crown and found out about their wife’s job.
If only they knew what they’d missed: the moneymaking scheme of a lifetime. While we were making banana bread, some people were making serious dough selling pandemic goods and services to the British government.
In July, the Treasury forecast its annual bill for personal protective equipment would hit £15bn. £15bn! That is as much as the UK military spends on weapons in a decade.
This money had to go somewhere, and £109m was agreed with PestFix, a pest control company with assets of £18,000. A modest £21m went to a Spanish businessman who acted as a “go-between” with Chinese factories. Another £155m went to a family office called Ayanda Capital, which supplied 50m masks deemed unsuitable for NHS use.
The PPE revelations, some exposed by the Financial Times, some pursued by campaign group the Good Law Project, should make us all think. Were we really all that busy with local WhatsApp groups and childcare? Personally, I thought that the UK government didn’t need me to liaise with Chinese factories. But it did need Asia Pacific Distributors, an Australian former drinks trader that has rebranded itself as “Your trusted PPE supplier for 25 years”.
I should have got in on the action. I could have dialled my old Beijing youth hostel. I could have dug deep into the cupboard where I keep used Sainsbury’s plastic bags and declared I had secured a month’s supply of hairnets.
It’s unclear whether my products would have been defective. We seem to have bought more PPE than we can use: 30 per cent of the port of Folkestone’s inbound container space is taken up with the stuff. Some equipment will pass its use-by date before it’s required.
The National Audit Office concluded this week that £17.3bn in pandemic contracts were awarded without competitive tender, and that the associated risks, including conflicts of interest, were not always managed. Acquaintances of ministers and officials were placed in a “high-priority lane”, according to the watchdog. PestFix was added to the lane “in error without a referral”, the NAO found; it eventually received contracts totalling £350m. Why didn’t I beg Tory grandees for their mobile numbers and ask them to make that error for me?
“This time next year we’ll be millionaires,” Del Boy, the king of English street traders, said in the sitcom Only Fools and Horses. I have bad news: if we didn’t make a quick million this year, we’ve missed our chance.
Will anyone be held accountable? In 2009, we were outraged by MPs’ expenses claims, partly because the amounts were so small. Now we’re numb to the PPE spending, partly because the numbers are so large. A misspent pound is an outrage; a misspent million is a statistic.
Ayanda’s chief executive Tim Horlick says it’s not his fault his masks were unusable: the health department belatedly ruled head-straps, not ear-loops, were required. If Ayanda specialised in PPE, it might have realised that the contract was not in line with the government’s published specifications. Sadly, Ayanda “specialise[s] in currency trading, offshore property, private equity and trade financing”. How could it have known? It wasn’t Ayanda’s fault that the project was facilitated by its senior adviser, who was also an adviser to the government’s Board of Trade.
Let’s assume Ayanda has done nothing legally wrong. Making money from the taxpayer should be about doing something right. Maybe one day Mr Horlick will tell his grandkids how he spent the pandemic selling unusable equipment to his own country. Or maybe he’ll do the honourable thing and return all profits from the deal before Christmas.
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November 20, 2020 at 10:47PM
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Why didn’t I make millions selling PPE during the pandemic? - Financial Times
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