The Tories’ former chief whip Andrew Mitchell and his GP wife are at the centre of a row over financial conflicts of interest in a body which took control of £302 million of NHS money earlier this month.
Mitchell’s wife Dr Sharon Bennett is a member of a London-based clinical commissioning group, a lynchpin of the government’s controversial health reforms. Doctors running the body are to be hauled before a committee at Islington Town Hall to explain why so many of them have links to private providers from which they may be commissioning work.
Among the companies of interest is DicateIT, which outsources transcription of medical notes to India and has already been blamed for the redundancies of 22 skilled medical secretaries at the Whittington Hospital in north London.
Islington Clinical Commissioning Group’s register of interests claims that Dr Bennett owns shares in DictateIT:
But records held by Companies House suggest that the shares are, in fact, owned by her husband Andrew Mitchell. With the holding also absent from his register of interests, the apparent contradiction leaves the couple open to the suggestion that they have tried to disguise his stake in the firm.
An investigation by the Camden New Journal has also revealed that doctors on the group have links to more than 30 private providers. Seven of them (diagram) have links to a private company, South Islington GP Alliance (Sigpal), which was bootstrapped with no less than £40,000 of private money.
But Scrapbook wonders why the Mitchell household would need such cash.
It was revealed last week that the former chief whip has joined a reputational risk consultancy — trousering a measly £3,000 per day.
