Michelle Mone accused of bullying builders renovating her £18,000,000 home
Lingerie baroness Michelle Mone has been accused of bullying behaviour towards builders renovating her central London townhouse, before it sold for £17.8 million.
Mone has more famously come under scrutiny over 25 million medical gowns supplied during the Covid pandemic, with a firm linked to her ordered to repay £148m to the UK government over claims the gowns were faulty.
But a new report claims that she called a builder a c***, and also sent ‘aggressive’ emails to builders threatening to expose them on social media unless work was completed more quickly.
A glazier who carried out work for her told the Daily Mail: ‘She was horrible to everyone, not just me. When one builder dropped some heavy gym equipment on to her new floors, she called him a c*** and told him he’d have to pay for repairs.’
A spokesperson for the baroness denied this, and said emails were not bullying but showed ‘understandable frustration’ at poor quality of work and repeated delays.
But the glazier claimed ‘To her, I was just something she trod in’ and showed the paper emails with the sign-off ‘Kindest Regards, Lady Michelle Mone OBE, Baroness of Mayfair, House of Lords, London SW1A 0PW’.
One read: ‘We are moving into our new home in less than two weeks. Your company is holding us up.
‘Failure to deliver on time will cost your company hotel bills for myself and my partner Doug Barrowman at The Corinthia Hotel.’
A further email a week later said: ‘You have failed to turn up & broken your promise again. Don’t you dare make any excuses that the payment was slightly held up when you’ve sat with our money in your bank for months. Get your team down ASAP tomorrow & finish this job before you deal with our lawyers in hotel bills etc.
‘I’m sure my 1 million-plus social media followers don’t want to hear that you have let us down!’
The glazier claimed he had never agreed on a timescale for the work on the house in Belgravia in 2018, was waiting on other workmen to be able to finish the job, and offered to refund her if others could fit the mirrors sooner.
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Mone, whose company made the Ultimo bra, was urged to resign from the House of Lords by Kemi Badenoch over the Covid controversy last month, but in a retort posted on X, she wrote: ‘Let me be clear: I have done NOTHING wrong. I was asked to help during a national emergency. I acted in good faith. I declared everything openly. The Cabinet Office and the Conservative Party KNEW.
‘This is the same party that wasted over £9.1 BILLION of taxpayers’ money during the PPE crisis and now they want to use me as a scapegoat to cover it up. They sneer and call me the “blonde bra Baroness” but I built a global brand from nothing. I’d love to see them try to run a business and succeed the way I did.’
Mone recommended her husband’s consortium PPE Medpro as a supplier during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the government had created a so-called ‘VIP lane’ to award contracts for medical equipment, but gowns supplied to the NHS from China were rejected due to a lack of proof they had been correctly sterilised.
Last week, documents filed by PPE Medpro’s administrators showed it also owes £39 million in tax.
A spokesperson for Baroness Mone told Metro: ‘The refurbishment work at Doug and Michelle’s London home, overseen by The Challenger Group, was significantly delayed due to [the] company’s poor management.
‘There is extensive correspondence between the parties which demonstrates this clearly.
‘The emails in question were neither threatening nor bullying; they reflect understandable frustration at the unacceptable quality and repeated delays.
‘There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to support any claim of bullying, and Baroness Mone completely rejects such an allegation.
‘Regarding the claim that she used offensive language towards someone delivering gym equipment, Baroness Mone categorically denies this and would never use the word or language alleged.
‘These are entirely false and malicious claims, dragged up seven years later in a vindictive attempt to smear Baroness Mone.’
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