A former Labour minister ran a “shoddy and inadequate” Covid-19 testing company that made millions from the NHS test and trace service set up in response to the pandemic, a court has heard.
Shahid Malik, who was a justice minister under Gordon Brown, is one of five people on trial at Bradford crown court accused of fraudulent trading and public nuisance.
The 57-year-old ex-MP is one of two defendants also accused of money laundering. The defendants deny all of the charges, which were brough by National Trading Standards (NTS).
Jonathan Sandiford KC, for NTS, told the court that the defendants were responsible for a Covid testing laboratory that was set up in 2021 as the third national lockdown was ending and the government was looking to private providers to expand its test and trace capacity.
Jurors heard that the defendants took advantage of this demand by setting up RT Diagnostics, run from a premises in Halifax, West Yorkshire, with “holes in the walls and ceilings, rubbish strewn around and even homeless people living on the floor above”.
Staff had “little or no training in the handling of Coronavirus samples”, jurors were told, and were not provided with personal protective equipment or subject to social-distancing rules that applied at the time.
The court heard that RT Diagnostics appeared on a government list of testing kit providers and was required to submit results from its laboratory to the NHS test and trace service.
Its website “falsely” described the laboratory as modern, purpose-built and fully accredited, Sandiford said, but RT Diagnostics never completed the accreditation process.
Between May and July 2021 it reported 123,104 tests, of which 45 – a “suspiciously low” figure – showed positive results, with 123,058 showing as negative and one indeterminate, Sandiford said.
He said components of the kits were sourced from Turkey and did not meet the required standards in the UK, while the laboratory did not have have sufficient capacity to conduct the number of tests it submitted.
Some of the tests were “simply dumped in a room”, putting people at risk due to the possibility that they received false negative results, Sandiford said.
He also said that staff were told to send back fake negative tests from samples that had actually never been tested.
RT Diagnostics generated nearly £7m between 22 May and 6 June 2021, jurors were told, as Sandiford described the venture as being “all about profit”.
Jurors were told a second company was created “with a deceptively similar name” which was used to open a bank account into which all the money generated by RT Diagnostics was deposited.
Malik is on trial alongside the Dewsbury East councillor Paul Moore, 56, the former Halifax councillor Faisal Shoukat, 37, Dr Alexander Zarneh, 70, and Lynn Connell, 64. Like Malik, Shoukat is also accused of money laundering. All defendants deny all the charges.
The trial continues.
