06-08-2020, 17:44
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#4992
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laeva recumbens anguis
Cable Forum Team
Join Date: Jun 2006
Age: 68
Services: Premiere Collection
Posts: 43,621
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Re: Coronavirus
Quote:
Originally Posted by joglynne
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"Interesting" story behind the company supplying the masks...
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/h...-ppe-wmps5kpjh
Quote:
The biggest contract was awarded to an obscure company with no history in the sector: Ayanda Capital. The deal was arranged by Andrew Mills, 56, a businessman who registered an offer to supply facemasks and other PPE on April 11. He told officials that he had secured “exclusive rights to the full production capacity of a large factory in China to produce masks” and could supply a very large volume immediately, documents filed in a legal case show.
Mr Mills, who once ran a technology company and has held jobs at Samsung and IBM, was working on behalf of Tim Horlick, a former investment banker and the chief executive of Ayanda, a family investment company. Mr Horlick said Mr Mills was a business associate who he had asked to assist Ayanda with the project “given his relationships with the Department for International Trade and his experience in international business and sales”. Since October 2017, Mr Mills has served as an adviser to the Board of Trade in the Department for International Trade.
He made the initial approach to the government in the name of Prospermill, a small company he had set up with his wife the previous year which has not yet filed any accounts and has £100 of share capital. It took more than a fortnight for a deal to be struck under which the government would spend £252 million on masks for NHS workers. Late in the process, officials say in legal filings, Mr Mills asked to switch the counterparty for the contract to Ayanda, saying that the company had an established infrastructure for international banking.
Until that point, they had seemingly been prepared to sign a large contract with Mr Mills’s own small company Prospermill. He said that he had been finalising his appointment as an adviser to Ayanda when he made the offer but “informed the [health department] of the intention to contract through Ayanda as soon as I was in a position to do so”.
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Quote:
Mr Horlick said he did not believe that Mr Mills’s role as a government adviser “had any influence whatsoever” on winning the contract and said there was what “seemed to be an extremely rigorous and professionally run procurement process”.
Mr Mills also said his position had no effect on the awarding of the contract. He declined to say how much he expected to make from the deal.
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