The Innova scandal Part 4: Questions the government must answer [21/06/21]

This is the fourth and final part of my investigation into the Innova Medical Group lateral flow test for Covid-19 – a test that the US has declared unsafe and unfit for purpose, yet which the UK Government remains committed to, perhaps because of its £3.2billion ‘NHS Test and Trace’ investment in it. Today I turn to Innova’s Chinese-born owner, whose name should have set Whitehall alarm bells ringing, and his associates who won the lucrative supply and distribution contracts. You can read Part 1 of my investigation here, Part 2 here and Part 3 here.

THE owner of Innova Medical Group, suppliers of the flawed lateral flow test (LFT) on which the British taxpayer has spent billions of pounds but which has been declared unsafe and only fit for the bin in America, is Chinese-born American businessman Dr Charles Huang (PhD in marketing from Strathclyde University).

He has been associated with scandal in the past. As the financial director of a Chinese automotive manufacturer, Brilliance Group, he ‘played a key role in the strategic alliance between China’s Brilliance Group and MG Rover Group in the UK in 2002’. This is what his biography page on Pasaca Capital, the company that wholly owns Innova Medical Group (IMG), at the heart of my investigation, proudly tells us.

In fact it is nothing to boast about. It was an ill-fated joint venture which was embroiled in scandal.

MG Rover, the last of the domestically owned mass-production UK car manufacturers, went into administration in 2005 and inspectors were appointed by the Department for Trade and Industry to investigate the affairs of its parent company, Phoenix Venture Holdings (PVH).

Written evidence submitted by PVH to the Parliamentary Select Committee on Trade and Industry in 2004 reveals that MG Rover Group had been working in partnership with China Brilliance and that ‘unfortunately, a major dispute between the owner and the Provincial Government (had) resulted in China Brilliance’s inability to complete the project’

The ‘major dispute’ refers to the sudden departure to the US of Brilliance’s chairman Yang Rong, who was wanted in China for alleged involvement in ‘economic crimes’. The head of Brilliance, Dr Brian X Sun, was also being investigated by the Chinese authorities and an arrest warrant had been issued for him too.

The reason for the termination of their joint venture with MG Rover was stated to be the ‘result of the non-receipt of payments due to MG Rover from the China Partner’.

In the 838-page report into the affairs of PVH, (compiled at a cost to the taxpayer of £14.8million) MG Rover Group’s joint venture with Brilliance Group, also referred to as ‘Project Sunrise’, Charles Huang’s name is mentioned:

‘Mr Howe [MG Rover’s managing director] reported that during the course of the Board meeting he had taken a telephone conversation from Charles Haswell of the British Embassy in Beijing. He confirmed that he had requested the British Embassy to make enquiries on the Company’s behalf as to the identity and whereabouts of Yang Rong, Brian Sun and Charles Huang and the position in respect of the Brilliance Group of companies. Mr Haswell reported back that Mr Yang appeared to have fled to the United States of America where he was expected to stay. He further reported that Brilliance as a group of companies had never had any intention of building motor vehicles with the Company.’

The whereabouts of Dr Huang were not detailed.

The report also included an extract from an article in the Financial Times: ‘Several senior executives at Brilliance China Automotive Holdings Ltd . . . are under investigation over suspected asset stripping among the group’s sprawling network of subsidiaries.’

Given these associations, Charles Huang hardly sounds like a person for the UK Government to do business with. Does Whitehall not retain a list against whom potential government contractors can be checked?

If so, it was certainly ignored when it came to the Department of Health (DHSC) awarding its premature IMG contracts – the first one of which, as I revealed in Part 3, was for £103million and was agreed nearly two months before the clinical trial evaluation was completed and published, or the pilot using IMG LFTs started. Nor did Dr Huang’s history stop the UK government from continuing to pay out close to £3billion to the Huang-owned IMG over successive months from 2020 to 2021 for more of its highly inaccurate Innova lateral flow tests which distinguished UK scientist John Deeks, in January 2021, again warned the government about before their planned mass roll-out, and which the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has now abandoned.

How did Innova Medical Group come to get these lucrative UK government contracts in the first place? Who made the introduction? How was this one company chosen? Why was Innova given such preferential treatment by the joint PHE and Oxford University evaluation programme run by the DHSC, chaired by Matt Hancock and overseen by Sir John Bell of Oxford University?

Some of this I touched on in Part 2. A Guardian report on the millions spent by the Government ‘on controversial covid tests for Dominic Cummings’s scheme’ last January confirmed that the context was the imminent collapse of Operation Moonshot, Cummings’s mass testing idea that preceded the LFT invention.  

According to Professor Tim Peto, the chief investigator for the lateral flow tests under Sir John Bell, fellow Oxford academic and overseer of LFTs for the government,  ‘LFT was the knight in shining armour to save the day.’ How long before the clinical trials were published that they decided that ‘Innova was top of the pile’, he does not reveal.

But by last summer a Cabinet Office Covid taskforce, including the Prime Minister’s chief strategist Sir Edward Lister, was pressing ‘cities around the country with rising caseloads’ to pilot the new tests, well before their clinical evaluation.

A senior public health source indicated the pressure they were put under: ‘Ed [Lister] and his team came to visit areas with high rates of Covid and kept mentioning LFTs and that the PM was very keen . . . When we raised questions, we were told . . . it was in Moonshot and was a proposal with endless amounts of money. The phrase they constantly used to us was “No regrets” and that Dominic Cummings’s phrase was: “We want to get ahead of the science”.’

Get ahead of the science Cummings did. He also appears to have ‘got ahead’ of  the Government’s normal protocols for clinical evaluation and procurement, detailed in Part 2, an irregularity (if not a transgression) which opened the way to an unknown start-up becoming the Government’s highest-paid single covid contractor and turning over a multi-billion pound operation.

According to the Guardian the Oxford (LFT Clinical Evaluation) team presented the results of their evaluation of Innova’s tests to Cummings in late October, with the health secretary, Matt Hancock. The decision to roll the tests out in a large field pilot as soon as possible was then pushed by Cummings, a couple of weeks before he resigned, with Innova the lucky winner of this opportunity. MHRA (Medicines and Health products Regulatory Agency) approval quickly followed. 

Mr Cummings resigned on November 13, 2020.

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