For the super-famous or just plain filthy rich, there are few more delightful places to splash out on a mansion than Fisher Island in Florida.
Nestling off the coast of Miami and accessible only by boat or helicopter, this floating gated paradise – where properties sell for up to £50million – has been home to the likes of Hollywood star Julia Roberts, TV presenter Oprah Winfrey and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the richest men in the world.
So strict are the rules that the exclusive residents’ association operates a three strikes and you’re out litter-dropping policy. Speeding too many times in your golf cart can also result in eviction.
Goodness only knows, then, what well-to-do denizens will make of the disgraced British couple who, according to friends, are about to become their new neighbours.
Step forward Michelle Mone and her billionaire husband Doug Barrowman, said to have snapped up a slice of the most expensive real estate in all of the US.
Not for the brazen baroness and her wheeler-dealer hubby the inclement UK climate – or the frosty atmosphere of the personal protective equipment (PPE) scandal which continues to swirl around them.
No matter, either, that £75million of their assets have been frozen by the National Crime Agency in the midst of an ongoing fraud and bribery probe.
Last week a High Court judge ordered that PPE Medpro, a company linked to the former lingerie tycoon and her husband, must pay £122million to the government for 25million surgical gowns imported from China and sold during the Covid pandemic which, it turned out, weren’t sterile and, therefore, an utter waste of UK taxpayers’ cash.
Michelle Mone posted a tone-deaf photo of herself online this week before a birthday bash
Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, at a charity dinner in 2019, before the Covid fallout
After the ruling, Chancellor Rachel Reeves demanded the company repay the cash in full, saying: ‘We want our money back. We are getting our money back.’
Hopes of seeing a penny of that money, however, are already dimming. While PPE Medpro is supposed to stump up the entire sum by next Wednesday, on the eve of last week’s judgment the company filed for administration with just £666,000 assets left in its once swollen coffers.
Meanwhile Mone and Barrowman, who divvied up around £60million in profits between them from the shady deal, are enjoying life high on the hog.
There is certainly no sign of the scandal making any dent in their life of luxury, which now looks set to continue on the other side of the Atlantic. Mone has told friends she is ‘excited’ about her fresh start.
This week she celebrated her 54th birthday in style, posting shots of herself on Instagram in the penthouse suite of an unnamed upmarket hotel, beaming at the camera with heavy make-up
and coiffed hair and sporting Victoria Beckham jeans, a low-cut corset top and vintage Chanel accessories. She spoke of getting ‘glammed up’ and ‘putting a smile on my face’ before enjoying ‘a fantastic night out’ with her husband of nearly five years, while whinging about the ‘government-led lies’ she still blames for the couple’s reputational downfall.
As one of her former PR advisers, Jack Irvine, put it to the Daily Mail this week: ‘She’s delusional; her own worst enemy.
‘The best thing she could do at the moment is to keep her head down, but Michelle just wants to be fabulously rich and fabulously well-known. The move to Florida is exactly the kind of mad thing she would do.’
Mone, nicknamed ‘Baroness Bra’ for her business exploits, aboard the Lady M yacht
She has sold property in Glasgow’s Park Circus for some £4.8million
The couple have also sold their six-bedroom mansion in London’s Belgravia for £17.8million
Flaunting her wealth on social media, this week of all weeks, might certainly be seen as tone-deaf in its timing.
For while she and 60-year-old Barrowman refuse to admit any wrongdoing in this grubby affair, the most pressing question of all is if – and when – they will ever be forced to hand back any of the vast fortune they made on the back of the UK’s Covid pandemic.
In advance of the pair’s move to Florida, records show they have been offloading some of their vast property portfolio in an apparent fire sale. Some of those they have been selling off were bought in the wake of huge profits made by PPE Medpro.
The sales were made after negotiations between their lawyers and the Crown Prosecution Service saw several properties released from those listed as frozen assets.
Others, including Ballakew Estate – their nine-bedroom. £25million, 145-acre tax haven home on the Isle of Man – and nine other Glasgow properties were offered in their place.
Of the properties that have been sold, their six-bedroom stucco-fronted Belgravia townhouse and an adjoining mews house – originally frozen assets – went for £5m less than their asking price to 20-year-old Freddie Tomlinson, son of Lawrence Tomlinson, an entrepreneur with a £525million fortune amassed through care homes and racing cars.
Records also show that ‘Baroness Bra’ (who built her fortune through lingerie firm Ultimo and was made a life peer by David Cameron in 2015) and Barrowman made a £2million profit when they sold two Glasgow townhouses in the exclusive Victorian Park Circus enclave of the Scottish city.
One, bought for £1.7million by a firm linked to Barrowman, was sold for £2million to Nick Haddow, fashion photographer and friend of Mone who shot her 2006 Ultimo bra campaign starring Helena Christensen and has also worked with the likes of Uma Thurman, Lauren Bacall and Dame Helen Mirren.
A nearby property bought in July 2020 for £1.425million was sold earlier this year for £2.8million – almost double the price – to Paul McManus, drummer with Scottish rock group Gun.
Mone, dressed in jeans and her favourite £1,695 Moncler down and fox fur coat, was seen lugging black bin bags, a Le Creuset pot and Louis Vuitton luggage out of the property and loading them into a silver Mercedes van as she and Barrowman cleared out their possessions last January.
In May 2020, soon after the start of the coronavirus pandemic, PPE Medpro was awarded government contracts worth more than £200million after Mone lobbied senior government officials.
The company was incorporated on the same day she referred it to ministers for PPE contracts via the government’s VIP fast lane without mentioning that she had a vested interest in the business.
Barrowman, who was part of the consortium which backed PPE Medpro, made more than a £60million profit on the deal, around £29million of which was transferred to a secret offshore trust of which Mone and her three children were beneficiaries.
Between 2020 and 2022, firms linked to the couple bought £10million worth of property in Glasgow.
Aside from the two which have been sold, nine are still subject to court orders which block their sale, although that doesn’t prevent them from being rented out.
Mone’s three adult children, who also benefited from PPE profits, also splashed out £3million on homes in the city.
Her oldest daughter Rebecca, 29, spent £1.64million on two homes, 25-year-old Declan bought a £750,000 flat and 22-year-old daughter Bethany spent £850,000 on a property which she resold for £900,000. A charming mews house in Chelsea, linked to Declan’s company, has been sold for £2.1million to a senior member of a Middle Eastern royal family.
Gone too, it should be noted, is Mone’s beloved 40 ft-long sailing yacht, Lady M, which was purchased via one of Barrowman’s companies at the height of the pandemic. It was initially advertised for close to £10million but sold in July last year for around half that amount, was renamed Dakota and is available to rent for ¤14,000 a day.
Mone caused outrage in the summer of 2021 when she posed on the deck of the yacht in her swimsuit, telling her social media followers: ‘Business isn’t easy. But it is rewarding.’
In early 2023, the UK activist group Led By Donkeys tracked down the boat to a marina close to Barcelona on Spain’s Catalan coast and renamed it the Pandemic Profiteer with new signage. Earlier this year, the group said it had originally intended to commandeer the vessel and sail it back to the UK, up the Thames and deliver it to HM Treasury.
Demands that Mone and Barrowman pay back the profits they made out of a national and global crisis are as loud as ever.
In Scotland, there were calls this week for a complete, not just partial, freeze on the couple’s assets.
‘Since Mone’s disgrace she’s shown no remorse or concern for anyone but herself,’ said Glasgow MSP Patrick Harvie.
‘If Mone and her husband are allowed to come out the other end of this with their millions intact, by squirrelling it away in assets, offshore or with third parties, it will represent a huge moral hazard within our democracy. The Government must use the courts to pursue every penny.’
In a post on Instagram last week, Baroness Mone lashed out at the Government and said that it had turned down a £23million offer to settle – a mere drop in the ocean compared to the money it lost.
Crisis manager Jack Irvine, who advised Mone when she was running Ultimo but dropped her after three months because ‘I couldn’t get the truth from her about anything’, says Mone and Barrowman should have offered at least double that and continued to negotiate.
‘If I was to advise her now I’d say she should hold up her hands and say: “Sorry. I’ve been really stupid.” But she’s one of those people who always believes that she’s right and the rest of the world is wrong.
‘She’s finished here. She’s finished in the Lords. Her reputation is in tatters. I doubt anyone will want to have anything to do with her in Florida either. I’m surprised they haven’t gone for another tax haven, like Panama or the British Virgin Islands.’
The Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK campaign group are now calling for Mone to be stripped of her peerage.
A spokesman said this week: ‘Greed and corruption during the pandemic have cost lives. Baroness Mone should have no role in making and passing the laws we all live under. Her title must be revoked.’
It’s hard to believe that Mone, who left school in Glasgow at 15 with no qualifications, was once seen as the epitome of rags-to-riches success, so inspiring that David Cameron’s government appointed her to help get more business start-ups going, especially in deprived communities.
She insists that she has been made a ‘scapegoat’ for an ‘orchestrated campaign designed to distract from catastrophic mismanagement of PPE procurement’. The past five years, she said this week, have been ‘pure torture’.
On the bright side, as their much talked about move to Florida suggests, she and Barrowman are still fabulously wealthy. In addition to their palatial Isle of Man home, they are still the proud owners of an £8million, six-bedroom, ocean-side villa in the Algarve, Portugal.
And if the past is anything to go by, there’s nothing like a crisis to bring out Lady M’s inner strength. As the Baroness herself once put it so delicately: ‘I’ve got balls of steel.’
