WHAT DO YOU GET FOR £500 AN HOUR?
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| OWEN PATERSON MP |
The MP for Shropshire North genuinely relished the time he spent in the Emerald Isle, because Ireland is brim full of
horses, and people who love horses as much as Owen Paterson does - which is a lot. His ongoing passion for the dobbins is a lifelong obsession; and he has ridden everywhere from England to Mongolia. Indeed, his late wife, Rose, was the chairman of Aintree racecourse, where they run the biggest race of all, the Grand National.
This clearly led the Secretary of State to join some convenient dots between the British mainland and Northern Ireland, because for Owen, the line between business and pleasure (his) does not exist. In 2015 an Irish pharmaceutical company named Randox began paying him over £90,000 a year for 'consultancy' work, whereupon the horsey MP advised -or persuaded- them to sponsor the Aintree Grand National as well as himself. Which they did (and still do). No doubt his wife was delighted.
Now it's easy enough to see what was motivating Owen in his arrangements with Randox. But what could possibly have motivated this company to invest such a lot of money in an English politician?
Fast forward to March 2020. Just at the point where Randox's investment in Paterson was creeping up towards a cool half million, along came the much-anticipated Coronavirus pandemic. Two important things happened immediately. First, Prime Minister Johnson appeared on TV to announce we were all effectively under house-arrest, and second, he launched a PPE spending spree of 15 billion pounds (of taxpayer's money).
Money was flying out of Westminster as the "national emergency" was used to justify the purchase of mortuaries, entire hospitals, dozens of vans and cars, ventilators, and a PPE bonaza of gloves, masks, gowns, testing equipment, you name it. In an "emergency", of course, you haven't got time to shop around for the best deal. So, like a starving lottery winner set loose in Burger King, the Johnson government was just grabbing stuff from the shelves, shouting gimme gimme gimme! Health Secretary Matt Hancock became a man possessed, swivel-eyed with excitement over "testing", for reasons that were -and remain- by no means obvious. We needed testing testing testing!
And as fate would have it, Matt's chum Owen Paterson knew someone who could help. Owen's friends at Randox stepped heroically forward and a mere 133 million pounds later, a shed load of hastily constructed testing kits were on their way to the UK from County Antrim in Northern Ireland. And suddenly the half a million Randox had already steered into Owen Paterson's pocket looked like money very well spent. As of July 15th a huge number of the Randox testing kits were withdrawn on Government orders, having been found sub-standard.
[A little-known fact about Matt Hancock is that in his youth he trained as a jockey, in the horse-crammed town of Newmarket, known worldwide as the "Headquarters". of British horse racing. So Hancock and Paterson share a lot more in common than membership of the Conservative Party]
Such a blatantly corrupt abuse of public money was hardly going to pass unnoticed and various outlets have pointed their fingers and shouted foul! But Paterson has skin as thick as his wallet. He has been shamelessly lobbying for people who bung him cash for many years, tiptoeing along the tightrope between conflict of interest and outright illegality. This time, however, he may well be caught with his nose too deep in the PPE trough, mainly thanks to the efforts of the Good Law Project (whose website you can visit by clicking HERE).
Because as the GLP has revealed, a whopping great of chunk PM Johnson's £15 billion splurge ended up in the hands of some extraordinarily unlikely customers. The money itself was allocated under the aegis of Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Liz Truss, President of the Board of Trade.
Two of the largest -and most suspicious- PPE contracts went to AYANDA CAPITAL- an offshore hedge-fund with two CEOs and no apparent staff (£252 million) and CLANDEBOYE AGENCIES - a company which manufactures sweets (£108 million). These contracts were awarded with no apparent competition, i.e. handed out like...well, sweets.
So who are these lucky people?
AYANDA CAPITAL is so dodgy you can consume the contents of their three-page website in about three minutes without learning a single thing of any use. CLICK HERE to take that pleasure. There is more solid information on the label of a beer bottle than on the Ayanda site. Despite announcing themselves to be a "London-based family office" the Ayanda website is in fact routed through a proxy server in Arizona (for security purposes we assume) while the company itself operates through the offshore tax-haven of Mauritius. In other words, it's an ideal vehicle for discreetly lining pockets. Ayanda boss Tim Horlicks is, coincidentally, a graduate of Oxford University, like Boris Johnson, Matt Hancock and Liz Truss, who were handing out the dosh.
Although there is no record of AYANDA CAPITAL having any specialist knowledge of or relationship with Personal Protective Equipment of any kind, most of their 252 million bung was for the supply of protective masks. If this wasn't bad enough, as has been widely reported, Ayanda actually delivered 50 million masks which are useless, as they don't even meet the NHS requirements.
So much for masks, but what about gowns? In the headlong rush to find millions of protective gowns, it's a little difficult to see quite what prompted the Johnson / Hancock / Truss trio to hand 108 million to the confectionary company CLANDEBOYE AGENCIES. As a quick visit to their website reveals, like AYANDA, they don't exactly specialise in protective equipment. Here is their own web-advert...
Not an ad that immediately makes you think "I bet they do great protective equipment for hospitals,", is it?
If all this looks just the tiniest bit fishy, be advised that Clandeboye Agencies Ltd is actually owned by two other companies : Anchor Fixings and Clady Holdings. In a remarkably timely move, Clady Holdings Ltd was created on June 8th 2020 and has no company records at all.
You will perhaps be reassured to learn that all three of the above companies are run by the same four chaps : Andrew Walker, Stephen Walker, David Walker and Nicholas Walker.
Eagle-eyed readers may, however, have spotted the significance of Clandeboye's location. Clandeboyes operates out of Unit 30 on the Rathenraw Industrial Estate, County Antrim, Northern Ireland. A mere nine miles, in fact, from the Randox Laboratory where Matt Hancock and Owen Paterson were recently welcomed on a guided tour of the facilities. How curious that two neighbouring (entirely separate) companies in Northern Ireland should receive tens of millions in the Great Corona Cash race. Unless you're Owen Paterson, for whom it might seem perfectly normal.
As it happens, MP Owen Paterson has another nifty little £500-an-hour earner in Northern Ireland, in addition to the 96k a year he gets from Randox. For some years now, Lynn's Foods, a multi-million pound operation, has been paying him handsomely -for what, we are not at liberty to say. What we can say is that Lynn's Foods is a half-an hour's drive away from both Randox and Clandeboyes.
One would not, then, be surprised to find that the Clandeboyes' spring windfall of £108 million was steered in their direction by someone with a working knowledge of both Parliament and the business practices of Northern Ireland. In that event, the person concerned may just have gone a step too far.
Behind the smokescreen of the CoronaCon, a handful of well-connected businesses have been handed smoking lumps of public money in the absence of any scrutiny as if no alternatives could be considered. Under the guidance of Director Jo Maugham QC, the Good Law Project are taking legal steps to expose what looks very much like a catalogue of downright corruption. You can sign the petition on their website demanding that the UK government make public the contract details of the Clandeboyes and Ayanda deals, among others. I recommend that you do.
TO SIGN THE PETITION - CLICK HERE
find Jo Maugham QC on twitter @JolyonMaugham
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