UK to name commissioner to tackle COVID-era corruption

LONDON - The UK's recently elected government on Monday announced it would appoint a "COVID corruption commissioner" to recoup billions of pounds of public money lost to "fraudsters" during the coronavirus pandemic.

The previous Conservative administration, in power during the worldwide health crisis, was widely criticised for alleged graft in the awarding of lucrative contracts and significant waste involving substandard protective gear.

Speaking to the House of Commons, finance minister Rachel Reeves said the commissioner's appointment would "get back what is owed to the British people".

"Because that money, today in the hands of fraudsters, belongs in our public services and we want that money back."

She accused former premier Rishi Sunak, who was Chancellor of the Exchequer at the beginning of the pandemic, of having "signed cheque after cheque after cheque for billions of pounds worth of contracts that did not deliver" for Britain's health service.

A cross-party parliamentary committee in 2022 described the chaotic purchase of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) items at the outset of the COVID crisis as a "shameful episode".

It said in a report that three-quarters of the £12 billion ($15.5 billion) the government's health and social care department spent on protective equipment was lost due to "inflated prices" and equipment that "did not meet requirements".

And in a 2021 report, the NGO Transparency International said Britain's emergency procurement process implemented during the pandemic was "partisan and systemically biased in favour of those with political access".

In the most infamous case, the government awarded contracts to a firm owned by the husband of a member of the unelected upper house of parliament after she made a personal recommendation to ministers.

After Baroness Michelle Mone's intervention, the government awarded her husband's firm contracts without tender worth more than £200 million for PPE that turned out to be unusable.

Mone's admission in a disastrous television interview that she stood to benefit from the contracts prompted Reeves's Labour Party to pledge the COVID corruption commissioner if it came to power.

Reeves said the commissioner would deliver a report to parliament, but did not specify a deadline or timeframe for its publication.

A public inquiry into the UK's handling of COVID is ongoing.

It has already produced an initial damning report that found that Britons had been "failed" as a result of the government's under-preparedness.

Later phases of the inquiry will focus on how the UK health service coped with the pandemic, vaccines and therapeutics, government procurement and the impact on the care sector.

Interim reports will be published before the scheduled end of the hearings by mid-2026.