Tories accepted £50,000 donation from firm linked to Michelle Mone’s husband

Labour calls for investigation after it emerges that Pulse Accounting has close connections to Doug Barrowman, the financier at the centre of PPE contracts inquiry

Welcome back to Democracy for Sale.

Recently I’ve been working on a new investigation - which has appeared today in the Times and the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project - that I think you’d be interested in.

The story involves Michelle Mone’s husband Douglas Barrowman, and a £50,000 donation given to the Conservatives in October 2022 - just months after the couple’s firm, PPE Medpro, was awarded £203million in Covid contracts.

These PPE contracts are now under criminal investigation over how they were procured. Some of the PPE was unusable in the NHS. The department of health and social care is suing for compensation. 

The £50,000 donation to the Tories came from a tiny company called Pulse Accounting, which at the time was controlled by a business associate of Barrowman’s.

Pulse Accounting - which had just six staff and assets of £49,000 at the end of the year of the donation - had never made a political donation before, and has not donated since. 

Under election law, permissible donations must come from those on the UK electoral roll or companies carrying on business in the UK. 

Barrowman, a resident of the Isle of Man, previously had a £2,400 donation to Conservatives rejected as “impermissible”. 

Pulse’s owner at the time of the donation, a tax advisor named Daniel Clay, owned a stake in the accountancy firm Clay Knox (UK) Limited alongside Barrowman. Clay Knox also formed part of Knox Group, the financial services firm Barrowman founded and chaired, an archived web page shows.

Barrowman has used UK companies to make donations to the Tories before. He admitted last year that he gave more than £170,000 to the Conservatives between 2017-2019 through another UK company in the Knox Group — Lancaster Knox.

Pulse Accounting’s £50,000 would have been enough to join the ‘Leader’s Group’ of top Tory donors, who have quarterly off-the-record dinners with the prime minister and leading cabinet ministers.

New documents obtained during our investigation also suggest that a British Virgin Islands company linked to Barrowman bought Pulse a number of years before. 

This BVI company, Perree (PTC) Limited, is listed as the trustee of a £20 million property in Belgravia previously occupied by Mone and Barrowman, which was put on the market in 2022. Perree also lent money to PPE Medpro.

Mone is currently on a leave of absence from the House of Lords “in order to clear her name of the allegations that have been unjustly levelled against her.”

Gavin Millar KC, an expert in election law, said there were grounds to investigate Pulse’s £50,000 donation to the Conservatives. “The donation is very large for a company like this with no substantial assets or turnover, and one with no history of political donations,” he said.

“There are grounds to investigate whether this was really the money of Mr Barrowman or one of his offshore companies. Not least of all the fact that a lucrative government contract had just been handed to his PPE Medpro company.

“A UK company can be a permissible donor to a political party if it carries on business here. But even if this requirement is met it must give its own money, not the money of a hidden, impermissible donor,” he continued.

Anneliese Dodds, Labour Party chairwoman, said that Rishi Sunak had questions to answer over the donation. “It’s clear the Tories will take cash from absolutely anyone with very few questions asked. Labour will clean up politics and turn the page on 14 years of Tory sleaze.”

The new findings come as Barrowman and Mone are conducting an outspoken PR campaign to try to repair their reputation.

Mone denied any involvement in the PPE Medpro deal through lawyers, but later admitted that she stands to indirectly benefit from about £60 million of profit from the contracts through Barrowman family trusts.

Barrowman declined to comment. Clay did not respond to a request for comment.

Read longer versions of this story on the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project and the Times.

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