One of the Conservatives’ biggest ever donors has profited from £135m of contracts with the Department of Health and Social Care in under four years.
Frank Hester, a healthcare tech entrepreneur whose company supplies computer systems to the NHS, gave Rishi Sunak’s party £5m this summer, the joint biggest donation to the Tories in decades.
His company, the Phoenix Partnership (TPP), paid out more than £20m in dividends between 2019 and 2022, with Hester the only shareholder.
The group supplies software to about 2,700 GP surgeries in England as well as support services to allow them to hold medical records for patients electronically.
The scale of business that Hester and TPP have with the NHS was uncovered by the Good Law Project, which found payments totalling £137m to the company since the start of the Covid pandemic in April 2020, largely under the GP IT Futures framework.
Full story in The Guardian, 20 September 2023
