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Revealed: How ‘unfit’ PPE helped former playboy buy two mansions

Glove tycoon Robert Gros splashed millions on luxury homes and planned to build cinema, disco and golf simulator

By Adam Bychawski
Revealed: How ‘unfit’ PPE helped former playboy buy two mansions
An estimated £27m worth of gowns supplied by Gros's company were later deemed “not fit for use”. | Katia Ponnampalam (CC BY-SA 4.0)
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A former ‘playboy’-turned-businessman made a fortune supplying PPE during the pandemic, even though the NHS may be unable to use millions of the gowns his company delivered, openDemocracy can reveal.

Chemical Intelligence Limited was awarded a £126m contract to supply 21 million medical gowns that were desperately needed to protect NHS workers treating Covid patients in May 2020. But data released to openDemocracy through freedom of information law shows the Department of Health and Social Care later deemed 4.5 million of them – worth an estimated total of £27m – “not fit for use” in the NHS. 

Lawyers acting on behalf of Robert Gros, the sole owner and CEO of Chemical Intelligence, said Gros could not comment because he “did not recognise these figures or amounts”.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0