The scramble to find and buy huge quantities of PPE - personal protective equipment - last year led to the government awarding multi-million pound contracts.
It was accused of wasting public money by ignoring its own rules and using some companies with no experience and who had never before worked for the government.
It has been ruled illegal by a High Court judge who criticised Matt Hancock, England’s Health Secretary.
The case was brought by the Good Law Project, a not for profit organisation, which gave details of how much the government spent on contracts given to different companies, not publishing details of them within the time limit.
They included £155,000 to a finance firm and £345 million to a pest control company for a total of nearly 60 million masks that proved unusable.
Ruling the Secretary of State’s action illegal, Mr Justice Chamberlain said there had been an historic failure to comply with the contract regulations.
He rejected the Secretary of State’s ‘excuse’ of special circumstances at the time and the urgency of obtaining PPE.
He said the public were ‘entitled to see ‘who this money was given to, what it was spent on and how the contracts were awarded’.
The contracts awarded were ‘plagued by lack of transparency, cronyism and waste’, he declared.
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