Coronavirus: Spanish businessman paid £21m for help supplying PPE to NHS
Billy Kenber, Investigations Reporter | Oliver Wright, Policy Editor | Isambard Wilkinson, Madrid
Wednesday November 18 2020, 12.00am, The Times
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A Spanish businessman who acted as a go-between on contracts to provide gowns, masks and other protective equipment for NHS workers was paid £21 million in taxpayers’ money.
Gabriel González Andersson received the reward from a company set up by a US jewellery designer with no experience of supplying personal protective equipment (PPE) and which won contracts with the government worth about £250 million.
Mr Andersson was sued by Mr Saiger for failing to secure supplies
The revelation came as a report by government auditors highlighted concerns over emergency PPE procurement contracts agreed by ministers. The National Audit Office found that suppliers with political contacts were put in a “high-priority” lane and were ten times more likely to get contracts.
Some companies were given contracts weeks before due diligence checks were conducted; others received contracts retrospectively to cover work they had already done. Mr Andersson, who lives in Madrid, was hired as a consultant to help to source PPE supplies by a US firm run by the jeweller Michael Saiger.
Mr Andersson was paid $28 million (£21 million) for his help in fulfilling two government PPE contracts and stood to make another $20 million from three further deals signed between Mr Saiger’s company, Saiger LLC, and the Department of Health and Social Care.
However, Mr Andersson abruptly stopped assisting Mr Saiger, according to court papers filed in Florida in a legal dispute between the two men, meaning that the jeweller was “left to scramble” to fulfil the contracts and PPE supplies to frontline health workers were delayed.
The sums involved shed light on the huge profits that were made from supplying NHS staff with vital protective equipment during the pandemic. The legal dispute in Miami, first reported by the BBC, reveals that Mr Saiger, founder of the fashion accessories label Miansai, hoped to take advantage of his experience working with Chinese manufacturers when he set up a new business at the start of the pandemic.
He said that he was able to secure “lucrative” contracts with the government and hired Mr Andersson to help with “procurement, logistics, due diligence, product sourcing and quality control of the PPE equipment”. These included deals to provide four million boxes of two brands of nitrile gloves that would have earned Mr Andersson more than $5 million for “services performed”.
Court papers listed Mr Andersson’s residence as an address in the wealthy La Moraleja suburb of Madrid. Outside the apartment last night, his father, Juan Luis González, a businessman, told The Times: “If the British people want to know how their government spends their money they should ask the government.”
Another Saiger contract, a £70.5 million deal to supply 10.2 million surgical gowns awarded without any competitive tender process in June, is to be challenged in legal action brought by the campaigning group Good Law Project (GLP).
The GLP is asking whether ministers paid “sufficient regard” to taxpayers’ money. It contends that the price of nearly £7 a gown exceeded the average of £4.60 from other suppliers at that time and that the order was enough to supply the entire NHS with gowns for eight months. Mr Andersson stood to make $16 million from the deal.
“So many things in this deal are inexplicable. But one of them is certainly why the government paid this Miami jeweller so much more than it was paying anyone else,” Jolyon Maugham, QC, who founded the group, said.
A spokesman for Saiger LLC said that Mr Saiger “has 15 years’ specialist experience in the production and distribution of high-quality goods sourced at best value from reputable factories in Asia”. He added: “At the height of the pandemic . . . we delivered for Britain, on time and at value.”
The Department of Health and Social Care said: “Proper due diligence is carried out for all government contracts and we take these checks extremely seriously.”
Mr Andersson could not be reached for comment.
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