‘Sickening’: £84m in taxpayer-funded PPE money goes to middlemen with the right political connections

An eye-watering £84 million in taxpayer-funded PPE money has gone to middlemen with political connections over the course of the pandemic, according to Private Eye reporting.

A thread posted by Good Law Project director Jo Maugham has crunched the numbers on a series of inside deals made as the UK grappled with Covid-19.

One company, Ayanda, won a £252 million deal to supply facemasks – with £155 million-worth of them being deemed unusable by the NHS over safety concerns.

Andrew Mills, who worked for Ayanda as a consultant, is a former government adviser, and was paid £32.4 million for the deal, while Tim Horlick (who owns Ayanda) pocketed £40 million.

Private Eye also reveals that another Ayanda director made £11.6 million commission on the deal through his company Marlinspike.

Nathan Englebrecht is the husband of Horlick’s daughter, Alice, according to the reports.

Together these sums amount to some £84 million-worth of profits going not to suppliers of facemasks but to “middlemen who were lucky enough to have the right political connections”, Maugham said.

Jack Peat

Jack is a business and economics journalist and the founder of The London Economic (TLE). He has contributed articles to VICE, Huffington Post and Independent and is a published author. Jack read History at the University of Wales, Bangor and has a Masters in Journalism from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne.