Dear All – you may remember a previous post of mine highlighting that one of the three main shareholders in the privatised Patient Transport Services company Coperforma, was Seabourn Ltd, which did not appear to be registered at Companies House?—Stephen Lloyd, 28 September 2016
Well: the GMB Union who I’ve been working closely with for months now over the whole sorry tale of Coperforma, have subsequently discovered that Seabourn is an offshore company based in Guernsey – hence no UK Company’s House registration. A director is John Porter, who also happens to be the Chairman of Coperforma!
And then folks – you couldn’t make this up – he just happens to be one of those names leaked by the Panama Papers exposing the secretive offshore holdings of the world’s mega-rich. Mr Porter is listed as a shareholder of Pentarn Management Ltd, a company whose jurisdiction is in another tax avoidance area, the British Virgin Islands…….
So there we have it – we already knew:
1/ That High Weald CCG gave our NHS patients transport service to a company whose service to local residents across Eastbourne and Sussex has often since been reported to be poor.
2/ And that the lack of care Coperforma has subsequently shown toward some of the transferred staff has been beyond deplorable.
But now we discover:
3/ Coperforma’s Chairman is a director of its largest individual shareholding, which isn’t even registered in the UK!
4/ And he is named as a secretive company director in ‘another’ offshore company from the notorious Panama Papers leak.
None of this may be illegal in the strictest sense of the word but, dear God, is it the way our local health service should be going?
The answer of course is most definitely not!!
So if you haven’t done so already please sign and share my petition demanding the High Weald CCG remove the contract from Coperforma and return it to the NHS – our NHS – where it belongs.
Stephen Lloyd was the Liberal Democrat MP for Eastbourne from 2010 to 2015. Following his defeat on 7 May 2015 by Conservative candidate Caroline Ansell, he announced he would retire from politics. He said he “never had as much fun as being MP for Eastbourne and Willingdon”. During his campaign in the 2015 Election. a theme emerged on posters, “Everyone knows someone who has been helped by Stephen”. He lost his seat by 733 votes. On 15 July 2016 Stephen Lloyd announced that he had decided to re-stand as the MP for Eastbourne in the next General Election.
