In 2021, we brought a case against the Government’s award of PPE contracts to Pharmaceuticals Direct – a company linked to a Conservative Party activist and donor, Samir Jassal. However, our legal action was paused by a technical error made by our external solicitors when filing the claim.

The High Court refused to hear our claim as a result and the Court of Appeal later ruled that the case should not proceed after a split decision between three of the judges.

We are pleased to confirm that we have been granted a hearing in the Supreme Court on 12th October to put forward our appeal against these decisions. 

Our case focuses on two PPE contracts given to Pharmaceuticals Direct, worth £131m in total. We have written about those contracts here. We think they are probably the most deeply troubling of all the PPE contracts we have looked at – they involve Number 10 and Priti Patel – and we have referred them to the Serious Fraud Office. It continues to investigate the contracts. 

Since we launched our case, it has also emerged that Pharmaceuticals Direct landed a third £86m contract with the Government – this time to provide lateral flow tests.

Back in October 2020, Good Law Project first exposed the illegal ‘VIP lane’ used by Ministers at the height of the pandemic to buy PPE from Conservative Party donors and associates, outside normal procurement channels. Ever since, we have been working hard to uncover the truth of what happened and deliver some accountability.

In June, we explained that we were appealing the High Court’s decision that - due to a mistake by our external solicitors – our case about the award of contracts to Pharmaceuticals Direct Limited could not proceed. Today, a split Court of Appeal has rejected our appeal, with one judge for us and two against.

Our external solicitors emailed the claim form that commences proceedings directly to the Government lawyers working on the case, as they had been asked to do, but failed to send it to a generic “new proceedings” email address by way of formal “service”, as had also been requested. The Government’s lawyers confirmed receipt of the papers almost immediately after receiving them but did not flag that the “new proceedings” email had not been copied until one day after the deadline for service.

This mistake had no practical consequences for the Government’s ability to prepare a defence since their solicitors were aware of the claim well before the deadline. However, two of the Court of Appeal judges hearing the case have found that it should nonetheless prevent the claim from being pursued. 

The dissenting Judge in this case has given a forthright judgment, observing that the mistake ‘did not have (and was never likely to have) any practical consequences whatsoever’ and: 

“If service is not to be validated retrospectively in such circumstances, form really has triumphed over substance and litigation has become a game of forfeits: the overriding objective, to deal with cases justly, has itself been overridden.”    

We agree, which is why we will seek permission to appeal to the Supreme Court.

Decisions like this have real consequences. A company with connections to Ministers was paid almost double the going rate for facemasks, even though Government had been offered cheaper alternatives. If the claim can’t be heard, the public may never know why.

If this decision is overturned by the Supreme Court, then we will have the opportunity to pursue this important issue. If the appeal fails, then it is our expectation that our external solicitors will meet all the costs wasted by the error, both our costs and the costs we will incur to the Government, including of those appeals.

We employ the best lawyers available, but lawyers are human and mistakes do happen. We continue to instruct Bindmans in this and other cases – and to be entirely confident we are right to do so.

We will keep you updated, as always.

Further to our 21 September update, we are pleased to confirm that the appeal hearing has been scheduled to take place on 1 February 2022.

Having been granted permission to appeal on 1 September 2021, we sought to have the appeal hearing listed as soon as possible. Government, however, said that its junior barrister was not going to be available until the end of April 2022. Even more unhelpfully, despite the appeal concerning a technical issue around service of the claim on Government, Pharmaceuticals Direct Limited (“PDL”) insisted that it needed to be involved - and that the hearing had to be pushed back to June 2022 to accommodate its barristers. 

We wrote to the Court asking for the matter to be dealt with more swiftly, and our request has been granted; Lord Justice Coulson agreed that “it would be quite wrong to wait until April/May because of the availability/unavailability of the respondent’s junior counsel”. He also agreed that PDL’s involvement was unlikely to be helpful, saying “I would have thought that the IP [Interested Party] has nothing material to add.” 

The hearing is therefore to be listed in January or early February 2022 – we will let you know as soon as a date is confirmed. Thank you for your continued support.

On 29 June we published a blog explaining that a technical error by our solicitors – involving the papers being sent to the wrong email address at the Government Legal Department, corrected a day later – led the High Court to decide we could not bring our case about the award of contracts worth hundreds of millions of pounds in deeply suspicious circumstances to Pharmaceuticals Direct Limited.

We said that we would appeal and we have now heard that the Court of Appeal has given us permission to bring that appeal. The Court of Appeal has decided that our arguments have “a real prospect of success” and are “of wider general importance”. 

We think we can go beyond that: the title of our blog was: “We do not believe this is what the law should be or is.” Reading between the lines of the permission decision, we think the Court of Appeal is likely to agree.

As soon as we have a date for the hearing of our appeal we will let you know.

It is only with your support that we can continue to hold Government to account. Thank you.

The Government Legal Department requires new claims to be served on a particular email address. Our lawyers served (1) on 27 April 2021 an “unsealed” (i.e. yet to be stamped by the Court) copy of the claim form on that address and (2) on 28 April a sealed copy of the claim form to three named Government lawyers dealing with the claim, one of whom acknowledged receipt.

The time limit for filing the claim expired on 5 May and on 6 May the Government Legal Department wrote and pointed out that a sealed copy had not been served on the correct email address.  

Our lawyers made various applications to correct that technical deficiency but yesterday they were rejected by the Court. As the judgment explains:

“The reason for the failure was an innocent, but careless mistake made by solicitors acting for the Claimant.”

With proper respect to the judge, we do not think the decision is right. The breach was inadvertent and had no real-world consequence. We think the decision reduces the law to an artificial game played without reference to reality. We do not believe that is what the law should be or is. We will pursue an appeal to the Court of Appeal but overturning case management decisions is difficult and there can be no guarantee of success.

What this means in practice if our appeal succeeds is delay. What it means if our appeal fails is that our opportunity to bring the claim will be lost. Should that happen it is our expectation that the solicitors will meet all the costs associated with bringing the claim – both our costs and the costs we will incur to the Government.

Obviously, we will keep you updated.

We employ the best lawyers available – but even lawyers are human and mistakes happen. We continue to instruct Bindmans in this and other cases – and to be entirely confident we are right to do so.

Government gets a bona fide PPE offer from a would be supplier. The company has sourced the PPE, submitted a bid and passed through the technical checks. They’re close to signing on the dotted line. But at the eleventh hour they get dropped. Instead, Government buys the same thing from someone else. Someone who came in later but with close connections to Cabinet Ministers - and at an eye watering price.

This is a story we have heard, with close variants, again and again. But Government secrecy means we haven’t been able to corroborate it - until now.

The bare facts of what Good Law Project has learned about two contracts awarded to Pharmaceuticals Direct Limited (PDL) are extraordinary. We hold documents evidencing that:

·       Priti Patel and Boris Johnson’s adviser Munira Mirza pushed the case of two middle men for PDL with Cabinet Office;

·       the first middle man was Samir Jassal. He is a Conservative councillor who has been photographed with Boris Johnson (and May and Cameron) and who has personal links to Priti Patel and a string of other high profile Conservative politicians;

·       the second middle man was Surbjit Shergill. A company he owned went from £200 to almost £10m in value in the year of the pandemic. Documents leaked to Good Law Project suggest he billed PDL over £16m for his services;

·       the first contract, for IIR facemasks, was signed only six days after a direct intervention from Priti Patel – and for a price materially above the average price;

·       the second contract, for ‘Meixin 2016V’ FFP3 facemasks, was concluded on 7 July - and only after officials from the political hub of PPE procurement, the Cabinet Office, overruled objections from DHSC that it was overpriced by £50m;

·       another bidder had passed technical assurance – and had even been sent a contract – to supply Meixin 2016Vs at the same time and in meaningfully the same quantity. On 2 July they were told Government had already bought enough of that type of mask. Five days later Government spent over £100m buying Meixin 2016Vs from PDL. 

Good Law Project has published a long read on how a number of politicians and advisors intervened in PDL’s bid for a lucrative contract. We link to all the key documents. And there is more to come. All involved say they did nothing wrong - and their responses can be found in the long read. We think the evidence we have published speaks for itself.