Stinking Tory Corruption 166


I wrote a furious article about the £250 million PPE contract inexplicably awarded to the “family office” Ayanda Capital, an investment house for private wealth tax avoidance. We now learn £150 million of face masks delivered are unusable as they do not meet the required standards.

The Times today reports the NHS year’s supply of top level “FFP2” masks for surgical and similar use – 43 million of them – delvered by Ayanda failed regulatory testing. This was entirely predictable. As I wrote on 8 July:

The normal public procurement tendering process has pre-qualification criteria which companies have to meet. These will normally include so many years of experience in the specific sector, employment of suitably qualified staff, possession of the required physical infrastructure and a measure of financial stability. This is perhaps obvious – otherwise you or I could simply stick in a bid to build the HS2 railway that is £10 billion cheaper than anybody else, win the contract then go and look for a builder.

Ayanda Capital would fail every single test in normal procurement criteria to supply PPE to the NHS. I can see no evidence that anybody in the company had ever seen PPE except when visiting the dentist. They appear to have no medical expertise, no established medical procurement network, no quality control inspection ability, no overseas shipment agents, no warehousing or logistics facilities. We have of course seen this before from these crooked Tories with their “emergency procurement”, with the “ferry company” with no ferries. But this – a quarter of a billion pounds – is on a whole different level.

I understand that normal procurement chains were struggling, but I would still trust any of the UK’s numerous long established and globally successful medical supply companies to go out and get the right kind of medical supplies, of the right quality, and arrange their supply and delivery, rather than throw an incredible sum of taxpayers’ cash at the first couple of City wide boys who said they can do it. From a company with a very dodgy balance sheet.

Plainly Ayanda Capital had no pretence of every having the expertise to undertake this kind of procurement. The excellent piece of investigative journalism (and what a delight it is to be able for once to say that) by the Times’ Billy Kenber reveals something still more horrifying. He says the deal was put together by a “government adviser” who is also an “adviser” to Ayanda Capital.

So there you have the answer to how this obscure and completely inappropriate company landed this massive contract; simple network corruption, with a Tory “adviser” taking a cut from both ends. It speaks volumes of how Johnson’s Tories view government; an opportunity for self-enrichment through getting their hands on the state purse. Covid-19 may seem a disaster to us, to them it is an opportunity. Procurement regulations are suspended. Massive contracts are thrown around with no checks and no competition. Public health functions like test and trace are thrown to new start-up companies owned by their their mates instead of being run by the established public infrastructure in councils and the NHS. It is a big, money-making Tory Bonanza.

We do not just need a public inquiry. We need people to go to prison. All those involved in the Ayanda Capital PPE contract would be a good start.

UPDATE 8:58am

I have just seen this absolutely astonishing thread from Jolyon Maugham at 6.25am this morning. It really is mind-blowing. Not only did the “adviser”, named as Andrew Mills, set this all up, he himself established an intermediary company in the transaction to cream off a fortune.
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166 thoughts on “Stinking Tory Corruption

1 2
      • Jane doe

        Cuntservitives should be ashamed of themselves and FO starting with Iain Duncan dunked in shite Smith followed by BORIS Johnson and his team mates

  • fonso

    Good job Britain has senior statesmen who can condemn such corruption from Olympian heights. Step forward Sir Ken, Sir Malcom, the Rt Hon Jack, Lord Mandelson, The People’s Tony. Tell us how it should be…
    Gentlemen? Where are you??

  • Rhys Jaggar

    I am afraid that corruption of various forms has existed in UK Government procurement since before Tony Blair left office.

    In a small way I saw some of it in action in late 2007, bidding for a significant contract to promote commercialisation of bioscience technology in a UK region. There was indeed a PQQ form (designed to eliminate no-hopers), a full bid/tender submission procedure and a b beauty contest which we were invited to present at.

    Right up front, I enquired with the client whether the incumbent were an overwhelming favourite for re-engaging. I had no problem if they were, it was just that my employer at the time was not of sufficient size to dedicate 25 man days of my time to a bid we had no hope of winning. We were informed that the tender was legitimately open for challengers, so we went ahead.

    We did not win the contract. No problem in principle, but when reading through the ‘feedback’ for tenderers it was absolutely clear that the procurers had neither read my submission, nor listened to a word of my presentation, since if they had, they would not have been able to say the things they did as I had covered all of their justifications for rejection in those documents/presentations and could point out exactly where.

    That was all mildly annoying, but the icing on the cake was be+ing told that the company was ‘too small to undertake a contract of this size’. Well FFS, you should have eliminated us at PQQ stage, at which point we would have spent 4hrs on the tender. You fleeced 25 days of free work, no doubt learning a great deal from the exhaustive research I put into the bid documents and then told us we should never have wasted our time in the first place. ‘Fuck off you obnoxious c**t!” is not exactly the language of business, but it was the expletive I mouthed whilst kicking a company wall in enraged frustration…

    It was the last time I had faith in public sector procurement and a fairly tart email I sent to various parties at the time may well have been a contribution toward the abolition of the RDA system, something I was not really in favour of having abolished. Just because you have one incompetent arsehole working in the public sector does not mean you abolish a whole national infrastructure built up over a decade….

    This latest episode is of course of an altogether larger scale, but multimillion pound contracts were secured through blackmailing officials caught in the company of prostitutes over 20 years ago…..

    The UK has always been a centre of blackmail, bribery, corruption and plain theft.

    This is hardly novel UK behaviour after all……

    • pretzelattack

      i don’t know how long albion has been perfidious, but it predates tony blair by a long shot.

  • Stevie Boy

    It’s ironic that in the recent General Election the two choices on the ballot form were for: ‘real change’ or ‘Stinking Tory Corruption’. The good people of the UK chose the latter, and here we are. Why are people even surprised or shocked ?

    • Loony

      I must have missed that option on the ballot paper.

      I don’t know how you think that anything can be done about corruption for so long as you engage in a massive money printing exercise. The printing of money is of itself the causal act of corruption. Numerous secondary forms of corruption are necessarily spawned from the causal form of corruption.

      I don’t recall any politician from any major party suggesting that this corruption be rooted out. So far as the British people are concerned they at least voted for a party that they expected to print less corruption than the alternative. How wrong they were, but such is life. Many more extremely unpleasant surprises are firmly baked into the cake. Will you be surprised or shocked when you reality pays a call and force you to live within your collective means?

      • Giyane

        Loony

        2700 tonnes of any material would present any government with a possibility for corruption.
        QE is literally TNT, because it gives the arseholes in power the idea that they are rich and powerful and can therefore mess with Russia and China .

        That’s not to say that Russia and China may not be just as leveraged as we are, but their leverage has intrinsic value, in the form of oil or manufacturing technology, while our leverage is pure media hot air.

    • Blissex

      «‘real change’ or ‘Stinking Tory Corruption’. The good people of the UK chose the latter, and here we are.»

      As perceived by many english voters the choices were: “safer job, better wages for everybody” or “booming property rents and prices for us in southern England”.

      Most of those who voted for the latter knew they were also voting for ‘Stinking Tory Corruption’, but hey you cannot make the omelette without breaking some eggs, and anyhow “Blow you, I am alright Jack” is a popular principle.

      • Squeeth

        British elections aren’t democratic, ergo, the public are the innocent parties in this.

      • Yr Hen Gof

        Seems to me it doesn’t matter who you vote for, the game’s rigged, Starmer knows it and will in future benefit from it (or his successor) and Johnson and his gang of career criminals are currently profiting from it.

        You lie and smear the Opposition, manipulate the polls (I understand GCHQ have form for this) and rig the ballot to confirm the polling. Add in a substantial increase in postal voting, put its administration into the hands of a private company with strong Tory links and Bob’s your mum’s brother.
        Cynical? Me?
        I haven’t got to the age I am without sensing the overwhelming stench of corruption, it has pervaded every office and function of state, with no exceptions.

        • Justin Fayre

          I remember canvassing for George Reid, arguably the greatest MP this country has ever had. He always said that he would stand by his record and would never treat decent people like dirt.
          For days and weeks we were out. Scottish music blaring from speakers. Canvassing returns were exceptional. Victory was assured.
          Then for 24 hours prior to the event, the Labour Party came out with their own ‘speaker cars’.
          With one message.. “VOTE LABOUR. VOTE LABOUR. THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP THATCHER OUT IS TO VOTE LABOUR”
          I kept telling myself that the people weren’t stupid. The people wouldn’t fall for this.
          The people fell for it. So many felt guilty for so long.
          I learned a bitter lesson that day.
          It’s not who makes the most noise but who makes the last and most effective noise that counts
          Methinks history could repeat itself so easily.

  • Jones

    the tories have hammered the public with austerity for years waging war on benefits claimants with propaganda suggesting they are scroungers while they themselves have skimmed off millions of pounds from the public purse to line their own pockets. Politicians are a vile breed of self-serving confidence tricksters, the only surprise to me is that sheeple keep voting for them. There is an argument against anarchy saying bullies serving their own needs only would trample on the weak and rise to the top, isn’t that exactly what’s happened with capitalism.

    • Loony

      Given that the UK has printed up almost £750 billion and lowered interest rates to zero then if the tories have only skimmed millions then they must be either so stupid as to be unable to dress themselves or mere front men for the real kleptocrats.

      Countless billions have been skimmed. You have been witness to the looting of the entire western economic and financial system. What is going on on this blog is the equivalent to firing up a zippo lighter in the hope that it will divert attention from the Beirut explosion.

      • glenn_uk

        By all that waffle, you mean this is nothing compared with the corruption of Trump and his stooges.

        • Shatnersrug

          Glen, you’ll never get the time you spend reading Loony’s post back you know, I haven’t read anything he’s written for over a year now see the name scroll on by. I recommend everyone try it!

          Dione Warwick: Walk On By – YouTube (2m 41s)

          • Stewart

            Serious question – how is he wrong?
            apart from the fact that the UK hasn’t printed the money but in fact borrowed it (and we UK taxpayers will have to pay it back with interest)

        • Ken Kenn

          Yes I hear 7 trillion dollars has been pumped into the US economy.

          And of course all the US folks are singing and dancing in the streets.

          Except they are not.

          If you print money ( just adding rows of zeros on a computer of the private banks) and you give it to the wrong people to supposedly invest then it’s not going to work.

          All they will do is borrow money at zero interest ( you try doing that ) and buy back their shares
          and pump the price up irrespective of failure or success.

          Trump calls this a successful economy.

          For him and his cronies it is – for the US people it’s not.

          For what it’s worth I watch the US stuff quite a bit and by Xmas the lid may start to come off.

          In the Whitehouse and in the streets.

          • James Charles

            “Thank you for your recent correspondence in which you asked whether or not the Federal Reserve “gives” money to financial institutions.

            The Federal Reserve lends to banks and other depository institutions–so-called discount window lending–to address temporary problems they may have in obtaining funding.

            Those problems can range from garden-variety issues, such as funding pressures associated with unexpected changes in a bank’s loans and deposits, to extraordinary events, such as those that occurred after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks or during the financial crisis in 2008 and 2009. In all of these cases, the Federal Reserve provides loans when normal market funding cannot meet banks’ funding needs; while the discount window is not intended for ongoing use in normal market conditions, it is available to cover unexpected developments.
            To encourage banks to first seek funding from market sources, the Federal Reserve lends at a rate that is higher, and thus more expensive, than the short-term rates that banks could obtain in the market under usual circumstances. To minimize the risk that the Federal Reserve will incur losses from lending, borrowers must pledge collateral, such as loans and securities. Since 1913 when the Federal Reserve was established, it has never lost a cent on its discount window loans to banks.
             
            The Federal Reserve does not give money to financial institutions. For more in-depth information regarding the responsibilities of the Federal Reserve, you may wish to review our publication “The Federal Reserve System: Purposes and Functions,” available online at https://www.federalreserve.gov/aboutthefed/pf.htm

            I hope this information is helpful.

            Sincerely,
            Board Staff “

      • VinylFlunkie

        “What is going on on this blog is the equivalent to firing up a zippo lighter in the hope that it will divert attention from the Beirut explosion”.

        That’s a good summing up however this blog does regularly inform. Unfortunately it still informs us that there are always factions in every illuminated corner. A suppliant journalist class will eventually be taken down by a strongly critical generation. All these desperate white European men, all with good hearts but no active vehicle part from this blog. I am sure its possible to elevate the discourse but that would require the petty sniping to stop.

        The corruption. Lets all agree, nay demand change, like an aggressive beggar beside a cash point.

  • Margeir Ásthildur

    Is it really true that the Family Office has no health sector background ? Doesn’t one of the Family have board positions on a number of NHS organisations, and thus can easily claim to qualify for such contracts ? It might not be so questionable as it first looks ?

  • FranzB

    Speaking of Tory corruption, I had to laugh at the 8.10 Today interview in BBC radio 4. It was between Nick Robinson (for it is he) and Robert Jenrick about the Tory government’s plan to rip up various aspects of the planning system.

    Robert Jenrick was recently caught out putting through a planning application from Richard Desmond on the nod, so that Desmond could avoid £40 million of charges relating to planning gain. Desmond duly made a donation to the Tory party a few days later. Jenrick should have resigned and Desmond should have been investigated for corrupting a government minister.

    I didn’t listen to the interview because I think Robinson is a c**t (political analysis at it’s finest). But in what universe does anybody ask a corrupt minister to comment on a Tory plan to make corruption easier. I presume Jenrick opened the interview by listing all those construction firms which have so generously donated to the Tory party. The UK – a neoliberal cesspit.

    https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/dark-money-investigations/exclusive-property-tycoons-gave-tories-more-than-11m-in-less-than-a-year/

    • Squeeth

      I don’t know about him being a ladies front bottom but he definitely got his start as the Bear from Bo’ Selecta! I hope his tail didn’t pop out again.

  • Blissex

    «otherwise you or I could simply stick in a bid to build the HS2 railway that is £10 billion cheaper than anybody else, win the contract then go and look for a builder.»

    Or put in a price revision later once the work is half-completed, after having creamed off a good bit of money.
    Some better managed places award bids to the *second* cheapest tender, think carefully of how that plays out in terms of incentives and outcomes.

    A commenter on the FT reported: “But having spent a decade working for successive Tory ministers whilst in the MODUK, we were repeatedly told that HMG’s policy was not to bail out failing industries and to seek best value for money. When it was pointed out (and repeatedly) that “cheapest” did not mean and was very seldom the best VFM, Tory ministers routinely disregarded the opinion.
    Then Miguel Portaloo kept repeating the mantra, whilst Chief Secretary at HM Treasury, that there was no significance or importance to who owned UK companies and the government, of whom he was a member, was entirely indifferent on the matter. The result: the purchase of over 50% of UK manufacturing by overseas companies and investment and locational decisions now routinely made anywhere but in the UK. Pretty much the same picture across much of the financial services and banking sectors.

    Unsurprising, as there is a case where “cheapest” means “best VFM”: when you believe that the value to your constituents of anything the government does is zero, then the only goal is to minimize the cost.

    • Stephen Ambartzakis

      Blissex, I had to smile at your post for the following reasons,
      One, Ayanda is an Nguni word meaning “we grow” or “it grows” with the corruption in South Africa being of such monumental proportions I thought the name of the company rather apt.
      Two, your remark about building the HST2 also made me smile, we have here a system known as BBEEE (broad based black economic empowerment) which means that companies which are black owned or managed get preference in government contracts. So the story goes that a fence around a government building in Pretoria had been torn down so a tender was issued for the replacement of the fence. There were two bidders, a solely owned white company from Johannesburg and a solely owned black company from Pretoria, when the bids were opened the Johannesburg company had bid 5,000 rand and the Pretoria company 10,000 rand. The owner of the black company was called in and told that to get the business he would have to alter his prices. But, he said to the minister, my overheads do not allow me to reduce my prices. The minster told him he wanted the price increased to 25,000 rand, 10,000 rand for you, 10,000 rand for me and we hire the bloke from Johannesburg to do the job for 5 grand.

    • Blissex

      «there seems to be no way to hold them to account……?»

      Via the ballot box, but why should the affluent property owners of “Middle England” vote against a government class that gifts them enormous property profits redistributed from the lower classes, and have done so for 40 years? “Blow you! I am alright Jack” is what those voters think, they greatly admire their benefactors for being “economic geniuses” and are very willing to forgive their “little” sins, indeed to write them political blank cheques, as long as the property profits come in.

      • Stewart

        “Middle England” is not composed of buy-to-let landlords screwing the poor and self-interested right-wingers indifferent to their plight.
        Far from it. Historically, the vast majority of Brits have been decent, hard-working and law-abiding – we wouldn’t have a welfare state or an NHS if this wasn’t true.
        The only reason Cameron got voted in was because of the utter hypocrisy of “New Labour” and the only reason Boris got voted in was because he was the only candidate who respected the result of the referendum. In neither case was it a swing to the “Right”, or anything like it. If you need a measure of how deluded and out of touch the political and media classes are, recall Jo Swinson’s election pledge to actually IGNORE the referendum result and cancel Brexit! I’m convinced she imagined herself addressing the nation from the front step of Number 10.
        It is “Upper England” that has been screwing the poor of this country for a thousand years, now joined by the American Global Empire in the guise of “transnational corporations”. Unfortunately for Middle England, the poor have nothing left to take and so it is they who are going to have to pay for this current fiasco.
        As for “holding them to account” you are correct that it can only be via the ballot box – but first there must be someone to vote for that is not wholly owned by the elites. And how can that ever happen if the media is likewise wholly owned?
        I fear that the extreme right wing we are told we must be afraid of is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy…

  • Tatyana

    There’s a universal Russian joke on the radical methods of solving problems. As usual, the personification of this approach is Stalin.

    “Stalin was asked:
    – We have so many corrupt officials, what should we do?
    Stalin answered:
    – Shoot all the thieves and paint the Kremlin into green colour.
    – But why green?
    – Well, I was sure that there would be no disagreement on the first point.”

  • Kenneth+G+Coutts

    Aye! Whatever happened to ISO companies.
    I even noticed way back medical supply companies with PPE supply chains, said they were never approached to supply.
    Aye! They’ll call for a committee and kick it into the long grass.
    Because their media will not follow it through.
    ??

  • Blissex

    All this scandal about an episode of individual self-dealing is of the sort that “Private Eye” loves, because the essential premise of “Private Eye” is that there are bad applies but the system still is sound.

    There is individual self-dealing in the UK, but most of it is at the local council/periphery level, while in other cultures outright self-dealing and bribery happens even at the highest level of government.

    But the UK is far from free from corruption and self-dealing, there is a lot of it, but it disguised as *group* self-dealing and corruption, that is entire groups benefit, and often statistically, as in 90% of the time, or 90% of the group, so most people cannot quite put their finger on it as outright corruption, and it is entirely legal.

    It is not just the massive discounts of “Right-to-Buy”, it is entire systems of tilting the playing field to heavily favoured groups, for example the very existence of the “independent school”/Oxbridge system is designed to buy for the upper-middle classes access to the “good jobs”, even if not every “insider” benefits, and some “outsiders” benefit too; but also the ability to borrow at low interest rates at 10-20 times leverage for decades but only giving as security a risky tiny chunk of residential land. etc. etc.

    • Mary

      I used to buy it in the 60s and 70s when it was radical and satirical with Rushton and Bookerl Now it’s a comic under Hislop..

  • Cynicus

    Congratulations on your rapid relay of the Maugham tweet. I urge everyone here to follow suit and pas it on.

    In a more civilised country this scandal would cause the government to fall. I doubt if this crooked scumbag Mills will even go to jail.

    • Cynicus

      “I have just seen this absolutely astonishing thread from Jolyon Maugham at 6.25am this morning. It really is mind-blowing. Not only did the “adviser”, named as Andrew Mills, set this all up, he himself established an intermediary company in the transaction to cream off a fortune.”- Craig Murray
      ————-
      The former King of Spain has just been forced into exile for lesser crimes.

  • Vivian O'Blivion

    This outrage dwarfs Chris Grayling and the Seaborne Freight scandal.
    And what of Grayling the fiercely dependable agent for No.10 (whom ever is in occupation). Grayling was lined up by Johnson to assume the Chair of the HoC, Intelligence and Security Committee but that plan was scuppered by a Palace coup led by Tory MP Dr. Julian Lewis. Lewis is a graduate of St. Antony’s College, Oxford (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). According to former Labour Party MP Denis MacShane, Lewis infiltrated Labour’s, Newham branch in the 70’s. Lewis was a fellow traveler of Brian Crozier and the Freedom Association (Crozier being another obvious spook).
    So the I & S Committee promptly releases the “Russian interference” report under the Chairmanship of Lewis (could Grayling have prevented this or in some other way lessened its impact?). The report alleges that Russian money is exerting nefarious, political influence in Londongrad. The Tory Party is split between the spivs and the establishment. Johnson had better watch his back.

    • N_

      I didn’t know about Lewis and St Antony’s. Up until now I’d dismissed the ISC chairmanship story as chaff for chatterers, but it seems that assessment was wrong. It’s not as if spivs are kept out of SIS (David Cornwell thinks it’s full of them), but Johnson has already been assessed as a security risk and they kept sensitive info from him when he was Foreign Secretary. That BBC story combines short-term damage limitation with longer-term exacerbation by describing Theresa May’s attempts to keep info out of Johnson’s hands when it has also been reported that info was actually kept from him – putting a dampener on the matter for the time being but wait until something serious happens. Jeremy Hunt (who made his fortune in China) twists the knife: “We have the finest intelligence services in the world in this country [slurp slurp!], but that does depend on some discretion by the foreign secretary.” There’s no way Johnson will last until 2024. What do you think about Jacob Rees-Mogg being kept out of the cabinet? Did he fail vetting?

      • Vivian O'Blivion

        If I were to speculate as to why Jacob Rees Mogg wouldn’t pass vetting, I’d start with Somerset Capital Management.
        William Rees Mogg’s later career with his Strategic Investment, newsletter was all terribly tawdry. Punting penny stocks for Canadian gold mines with fabricated assay reports and that sort of thing. A vehicle for targeting the gullible and naïve.
        My guess is that the fruit hasn’t fallen far from the tree.
        The whole “Honourable member for the 18th century” schtick strikes me as faux. Theatre to fool the plebs. Putting his children in practically fancy dress for photo ops.. His dad was a wrong un from an upper middle class background and the son ain’t no aristocrat.

  • N_

    In other coronaviru$ new$: the Dow Jones has risen by 47% since March and Facebook’s share price has risen 80%.

    All right for some, eh? Meanwhile hundreds of millions of workers will be made unemployed – or are already unemployed, if you count being “furloughed” or “working (sic) from home” receiving money borrowed from banks (which cannot go on for much longer [*]) as being unemployed.

    Mark “I wouldn’t let my offspring go anywhere near all that internet sh*t” Zuckenberg has now “joined the ranks of the centibillionaires”, to use journospeak.

    Meanwhile the New York Times is giving advice on what to do when dating someone new: don’t go physically close to them, and pull your knob at them through a service offered by Google or Apple. Ever felt there’s something wrong with current society?

    Note
    *) “Which cannot go on for much longer”. Why not? Because this is not Keynesianism or Fordism. This is when the loanshark-landlord lets you stay in your home for a week or two while the skip stands outside the window that his thugs are going to throw your furniture into; while his “tradesmen” have forced their way in and are busy putting locks on your internal doors so the house can be turned into “multiple occupancy”; and while your wife and daughter are being assessed for how much the said “businessman” will make from them when he puts them on the game. But have a nice time in Torremelinos, right?

    • Frank Hovis

      Old Man,
      Your pompous prose style makes it too easy to spot your posts. You are Habbabostik and I, once again claim my £5. It’s not really a fair competition though. As Mary remarked the other day, you’re too formulaic.

    • N_

      Nice try at PR for the City. Pension funds – mm, cleaner than clean. As you well know, market capitalisation isn’t real wealth. Most of the killing will be made by selling before the inevitable crash. The economy has shrunk by maybe 20-30% and share prices have increased by 50%. Such a scissors movement doesn’t mean the hordes of workers with pension schemes can expect to do very nicely thank you. Anyone in a pension scheme should leave it. Stock prices will crash. The Facebook-Dow chart illustrates the accelerating concentration of capital.

    • George Mc

      Re: “borrowing money from banks”, the banks themselves stole from public funds.

      • James Charles

        The banks don’t need to ‘steal money’?
        “Saving does not by itself increase the deposits or ‘funds available’ for banks to lend. Indeed, viewing banks simply as intermediaries ignores the fact that, in reality in the modern economy, commercial banks are the creators of deposit money. This article explains how, rather than banks lending out deposits that are placed with them, the act of lending creates deposits — the reverse of the sequence typically described in textbooks.”
        http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/2014/qb14q102.pdf
        ‘An empirical test is conducted, whereby money is borrowed from a cooperating bank, while its internal records are being monitored, to establish whether in the process of making the loan available to the borrower, the bank transfers these funds from other accounts within or outside the bank, or whether they are newly created. This study establishes for the first time empirically that banks individually create money out of nothing. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks individually, “out of thin air”. . . .
        Thus it can now be said with confidence for the first time – possibly in the 5000 years’ history of banking – that it has been empirically demonstrated that each individual bank creates credit and money out of nothing, when it extends what is called a ‘bank loan’. The bank does not loan any existing money, but instead creates new money. The money supply is created as ‘fairy dust’ produced by the banks out of thin air.32 The implications are far-reaching.’
        https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1057521914001070

  • Squeeth

    Polaris, Trident. MRCA, Typhoon, wars of racial extermination, eugenic massacres, permanent mass unemployment…. Fingers in the till like this are a mere bagatelle. Things like this don’t happen in democracies and never did.

  • Wally Jumblatt

    One question might be-
    Why was our beloved NHS procurement system unable to organise the purchase of said PPE?
    Another question might be-
    Why is the UK civil service so incompetent that they were unable to organise the competent purchase of said PPE?
    Another question might be-
    Why was the UK mainstream media not on the case 5 minutes after these contracts were placed? Do their journalists no longer have sources?

    • Denise Williams

      That requires journalists to investigate. Sadly very few journalists actually bother to investigate anything anymore. They are given the information however if it doesn’t suit their biased bigoted agenda it is never used or printed. I know I have dealt with them. If you point out their responsibility to investigate things they become so precious and accuse you of bullying the so delicate petals. Our meda is a complete waste of time and space.

  • Denise Williams

    Put these crooks in prison. Great idea we can start with Liz Truss and the other bent no marks in government. Yet another multi million pound contract going to a Tory mate or donor with dodgy company. This is public money being awarded to the Tories corrupt mates. It is high time this country stopped prizing Brexit over public and NHS safety and peoples lives.

  • Xavi

    So we’re supposed to believe that Murdoch is suddenly outraged at public funds being ladled over to crooks?

    No. Giving the nod to investigations like this simply reveals the old toad views Sir Keir as a more reliable and biddable figurehead for a system devised and controlled by rapacious oligarchs. As soon as he knew the wooden man had TB’s imprimatur it was open season on the albino sea elephant and Cummings.

  • chris

    43 million FFP2” masks for surgical and similar use failed regulatory testing

    you would have expected to have tested such a large number in batch numbers of a certain size, say 10,000 at a time…..and proceeded with order on the basis.

    there must be well-known statistical techniques used for testing such large numbers of products

  • Dave Lawton

    Yes Craig there is a lot of it about and it is not just the Tories.Years ago Labour gave Millions to a fake Russian Energy company.The NHS has the problem also. “A head of procurement for the NHS has set up a business to profit from the private sale of huge quantities of personal protective equipment (PPE) in the midst of the coronavirus outbreak, an undercover investigation by the Guardian can reveal.
    David Singleton, 42, a senior NHS official in London who has been working at the capital’s Covid-19 Nightingale hospital, launched the business two weeks ago to trade in visors, masks and gowns. ” https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/may/01/revealed-nhs-procurement-official-privately-selling-ppe

    • James Charles

      “Years ago Labour gave Millions to a fake Russian Energy company.”
      You have a reference for that? Thanks.

  • Yeah, Right

    If I read Jolyon Maugham’s thread correctly then it may be counter-productive to concentrate on Ayanda Capital. It is entirely possible that the entire rotten scheme is really the brainchild of ProsperMill (a.k.a. Andrew Mills) and Ayanda Capital was brought in merely to provide something for Mills to hide himself behind.

    Rotten. To. The. Core.

  • Mary

    First it was the Ayanda face masks. Now it’s the contract with Randox Laboratories in Northern Ireland for test kits that has been cancelled. The swabs supplied were not sterile.

    The story was on the internet more than a fortnight ago but the BBC have only just picked it up.

    ‘Half a million Covid-19 testing kits from major government supplier are recalled ‘after spot checks revealed they were not sterile’
    Care homes and public told to stop using Randox swabs immediately yesterday.
    Concerns raised when paperwork found to be missing from Chinese supplier.
    Physical inspections found swabs not sterile – raising fears about their reliability’/
    https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8532929/Half-million-Covid-testing-kits-Randox-recalled-checks-revealed-not-sterile.html

    Guess who Randox donates to? Owen Paterson, Con MP. N Shropshire.

    ‘An investigation by Buzzfeed News also revealed that the Conservative MP for North Shropshire, Owen Paterson, has been a consultant to Randox Laboratories – which offers rapid ‘COVID-19 home testing kits’ for sale – since August 2015. According to the register of MPs’ financial interests, Paterson has declared that he expects to receive £8,333 a month from the company, starting from April 2017.
    https://bylinetimes.com/2020/05/22/another-conservative-donor-involved-in-covid-19-contracts/

    What does Paterson do for £100k pa.?

    • Mary

      Paterson was SoS for Northern Ireland. Also DEFRA minister.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Owen_Paterson

      Paterson also receives donations from another NI company, Lynn’s Country Foods. That’s £12k pa. See ‘Paterson as Consultant’ on the Wiki link.

      His wife was found dead in woodland in June. She was the daughter of Lord Ridley. Her brother Matt Ridley writes for the Times and is an author. He was the chairman of Northern Rock when it collapsed and had to be bailed out in 2007

      How many £billions did we fork out to ‘them that hath’ in 2007/8?

      • VinylFlunkie

        any decent journalists looking for a great sunday magazine story? (fat chance)

        • Mary

          The Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund has more of the same today

          Tory backers net £180m PPE deals
          Opposition MPs raise ‘cronyism’ fears as row grows over contracts awarded at height of pandemic panic
          https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-backers-net-180m-ppe-deals-xwd5kmnqr

          Three companies are named – Meller Designs. P14 Medical and a third company, Clipper Logistics. The latter has been ‘given a £1.3m contract by the government to distribute PPE. Its founder and executive chairman, Steve Parkin, has donated more than £500,000 to the Tories.

          The contract was not subject to a competitive tender. Clipper Logistics declined to comment.

          The Department of Health said: “Proper due diligence is carried out for all government contracts. We have a robust process in place that ensures that orders are high quality and meet strict safety standards.’

          https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/tory-backers-net-180m-ppe-deals-xwd5kmnqr

          .

  • Theophilus

    “We now learn £150 million of face masks delivered are unusable as they do not meet the required standards.”

    In the normal course of business this money either would not be paid to the supplier of defective goods or have to be refunded or have I missed something? Or is it just possible that the masks were not defective but someone is happily stirring the sh*t?

  • Marmite

    ‘We do not just need a public inquiry. We need people to go to prison. All those involved in the Ayanda Capital PPE contract would be a good start.’

    The problem is that we need public inquiries about so many things. It seems to me that the Tories have a strategy of committing one crime after another, not only to normalise this kind of politics (for which the precedents are found in the US and Brazil) but also to make it impossible to even contemplate having public inquiries about all these things.

    I agree though, and have always thought that the only good Tory is the one with a life-sentence in prison. I don’t say that on ideological grounds, but simply on moral grounds.

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