A lawyer who represented Michelle Mone has offered an “unqualified apology” for incorrectly claiming she was not connected to a firm that received PPE contracts worth £200m during the coronavirus pandemic.
Two other lawyers who acted for the former Conservative peer, and told the media she was not connected to or involved in the company, PPE Medpro, did not apologise, stressing that client confidentiality limited what they could say about the matter.
The Guardian has taken the decision to name all three lawyers after Mone admitted in a BBC interview to lying to the media about her involvement in PPE Medpro, which she had recommended to government ministers as a potential supplier.
Mone, who until now has largely communicated to the press via her lawyers, now accepts she was involved in the business and that her husband, Doug Barrowman, received more than £60m in profits, which he shared with his family.
The Tory peer said she “wasn’t trying to pull the wool over anyone’s eyes” when she repeatedly did not tell the truth about her involvement in PPE Medpro – in order, she said, to protect her family from press attention. When it was put to her that she had admitted lying to the press, Mone replied: “That’s not a crime.”
In late 2020, when the Guardian began making inquiries about Mone’s links to PPE Medpro, Jonathan Coad, a well-known media lawyer, said his client “never had any role or function” in the company. He also said “any suggestion of an association” between Mone and the company would be “inaccurate”, “misleading” and “defamatory”.
Contacted for comment by the Guardian this week, Coad said he was not aware until recently that he had been misled, and apologised for unwittingly misleading the media.
He said: “I neither knew nor had any reason to believe that my client was not telling me the truth and wrote to your title in good faith … My client was also a member of the House of Lords and had therefore been deemed trustworthy by the state. I was therefore entitled to start with the assumption that she would not mislead me.
“To the extent that I unintentionally misled your colleagues and title, I offer my unqualified apology. I am a devout Christian, and hold to the values of truth and integrity as faithfully as I can.”
Coad said Mone’s version of events had been confirmed at the time by her husband, and that he had received “a substantial amount of corroborative material” from solicitors for PPE Medpro.
“I therefore acted neither negligently nor in bad faith in writing in the terms that I did. Rather I had little professional option but to do so,” he said.
He added that it was “beyond the forensic power of any solicitor” to be able to take steps to be “absolutely sure that the all the information that a client gives them is true and accurate”.
A ‘skewed lens’
In separate responses to the Guardian, two of Mone’s other former lawyers stressed that rules around client confidentiality limited what they could say about statements they had released on behalf of the disgraced Tory peer.
David McKie, a Scottish lawyer and partner in the firm Levy and McRae, had repeatedly told the Guardian that Mone was not involved in the company.
“You have now been placed on notice on numerous occasions of our client’s position in relation to PPE Medpro,” he said in one email, in February 2022. “She has no involvement in the business.” In other emails he accused a Guardian reporter of appearing to have “entirely malevolent” motives and operating with a “skewed lens”.
Contacted for comment this week, McKie did not respond directly but instead instructed his own lawyer to reply on his behalf. The lawyer said McKie could not comment on “what he was or was not told” without breaching his duty of confidentiality to his client.
Commenting in general terms, the lawyer said McKie had “never advanced a factual position on behalf of a client without being aware of the basis therefor and instructed to do so”.
A third solicitor, Eddie Parladorio of Hanover Bond Law, variously represented Mone, Barrowman and PPE Medpro from 2020. In extensive correspondence with the Guardian, Parladorio asserted that Mone was “not connected in any way with PPE Medpro”.
Parladorio accused a Guardian reporter of being seemingly “driven by an overt hostility towards our client rather than a fair and reasonable appraisal of the facts” and warned that “inaccurate or misleading reporting will of course leave you and your newspaper vulnerable to legal action from our client”.
Contacted for comment this week, Parladorio said he was “very limited” in what he could say because of client confidentiality. “Suffice it to say that I have acted at all times in accordance with my duties and obligations as a solicitor.” He added: “The simple fact of this matter is that I acted with total propriety throughout.”
