As the life peer's firm is ordered to pay back over £100m for mis-selling PPE equipment to the government during Covid, Guy Walters takes a close look at the company records and wonders whether the lingerie tycoon was ever as successful as we were led to believe

This week has been an emphatically bad one for Baroness Mone of Mayfair in the City of London. On Wednesday, a High Court judge ordered that PPE MedPro, a firm controlled by her and her husband Doug Barrowman, should repay at least £122m for supplying 25 million surgical gowns that did not meet rules on producing sterile equipment.

Baroness Mone is, of course, Michelle Mone, probably best known by her tabloid sobriquet, "Baroness Bra", because of her former career as a lingerie tycoon, in which she apparently netted millions from her supposedly massively successful Ultimo range of lingerie.

But then, Mone is used to having bad weeks: along with Barrowman and companies and charities associated with the couple, she has been, or is currently being, investigated by HMRC, the National Crime Agency, the Charity Commission, and the commissioner for standards of the House of Lords, from where the life peer announced she "will be taking a leave of absence [...] in order to clear her name of the allegations that have been unjustly levelled against her" concerning her alleged links to PPE MedPro, which was awarded £200m of PPE contracts.

In addition, it recently emerged that Mone had to sell her luxury yacht for a reported £10.25m, as well as her house in Belgravia for £20m.

Although Mone has not yet completely fallen from grace, it does seem timely to wonder just how successful Ultimo really was, and thereby to establish just how brilliant a businesswoman she really was. Let's not forget that Lady Mone was awarded an OBE in the 2010 new year honours list for "services to the Lingerie Industry", and her peerage was granted in September 2015 because she was "one of the UK's leading entrepreneurs".

It is easy to see why the governments of both Gordon Brown and David Cameron gave Mone these honours, because on the surface, it looked like she was very successful indeed.

After all, this was a woman who through sheer drive and ability had emerged - in her own words - from a childhood of "both personal and economic struggle" to form Ultimo Lingerie, which she apparently took from "from zero to hero, transforming it from an initial idea and concept into one of the UK's leading lingerie lines for over two decades" before selling it "to lingerie giants, MAS Holdings - one of the world's largest manufacturers of intimates".

As well as being apparently so successful, Mone also had an immensely high profile. It certainly helped that she felt sufficiently confident in her looks to model her own lingerie and that her glamorous and luxurious lifestyle ensured that Mone regularly appeared in the gossip pages of both tabloid and broadsheet alike. And partly thanks to her high-profile charity work, which included sitting on the board of directors for The Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust and hobnobbing with the great and good.

Mone was feted, not just because of her glamour, but also because of what looked like her considerable business acumen. In the one interview, Mone is described as being the "founder and chief executive of a £45m lingerie company", with her business, MJM International, lauded as "one of the country's top lingerie companies with five brands and a workforce of more than 120 people in the UK and Hong Kong, with a further 1,200 working in factories in China".

The company really took off when "Julia Roberts wore an Ultimo bra for her role in Erin Brockovich and the brand's fame spread further amid rumours that Camilla Parker Bowles wore one ahead of her marriage to Prince Charles". Tellingly, at the same time, it was reported that "Mone is guarded about the firm's sales figures".

Michelle Mone would recount how the company enjoyed a £42m turnover, and that she had made her first million-pound turnover in 2001.

When once asked if she allowed herself "the odd indulgence", the businesswoman unashamedly radiated an aura of deep, deep pockets.

"Yes, I am a car fanatic!" she replied. "They are my real weakness. I own quite a few, including a Range Rover, Aston Martin, Bentley, Audi and Porsche Panamera. I also love Mont Blanc pens, and I've got about 100."

Mone was undoubtedly saying to the world that she was very rich, and that she was very rich because she was a very good businesswoman.

But how successful was Ultimo really?

To answer, we just need to look at the records filed to Companies House by MJM International, a limited company of which Mone was a shareholder, along with her then husband, Michael Mone, and, over the years, a succession of others. As the company was incorporated in 1996 and finally dissolved in 2021, there are too many records to go through here, but it would be useful to have a look at how the company was faring at the time she was doing her round of interviews.

Let's go back to the claims she was making in 2007. (Incidentally, I'm going to leave aside the Julia Roberts/Erin Brockovich bit, because that has been widely discredited, and I haven't the foggiest whether the Queen did sport an Ultimo bra, and I'm certainly not going to ring up the palace and ask.) What was the basis that Mone's firm was worth £45m?

Here's the balance sheet from April 2007.

To me, this doesn't look like a company worth £45m, or that employs 120 people. Interestingly, the accounts were filed for a "small company", which, before 1 January 2016, meant that your company's annual turnover could not be more than £6.5m, the balance sheet total could not be more than £3.26m, and the average number of employees could not be more than 50. Not 120. Nor 1,200.

By April 2008, MJM was now a medium-sized company, reporting a pre-tax profit of just over £900,000.

Curiously, the number of employees was nowhere near 120, but somewhat fewer - a mere 25 (see below).

In addition, Mone and her husband, along with their fellow directors and investors, also awarded themselves £426,000 in dividends in January 2008, on top of the emoluments of around £100,000-plus that the three directors each took. I'd estimate that Mone herself probably made, before tax, some £250,000 that year. That's clearly a very nice income, but it's not multimillionaire stuff.

In short, Mone and her husband were building a nice small to medium-sized business, but they were drawing an enormous amount out of it, both in dividends and in loans, and there was still a lot of debt.

Let's spool forward to a few years later, to 2011: how was her business looking at the time?

In short, it wasn't looking great. In the year ending April 2009, the profit before tax was £960,524. For April 2010, the profit was down to £794,557. And by April 2011, the profits were down a huge amount - to £104,790, on a turnover that had decreased by 18 per cent to £8.4m from £10.2m. After tax, the business reported a total profit of just £1,418. Unsurprisingly, no dividends were paid that year.

I have a small inkling of how Mone and her husband were able to afford that £500,000-plus fleet of cars, or indeed collect expensive fountain pens, and it lies in the fact that the couple had borrowed just over £600,000 from the firm, which seems like rather a lot.

There was no way that Mone's company was ever worth more than £40m as she was claiming. Had they looked a little closer, both the Brown and Cameron governments, before they awarded her any honours, might have indicated that Mone's business was not quite as spectacularly successful as was often claimed.

Besides, by September 2015, when she was made a peer, Mone had sold her stake in MJM for an undisclosed sum, which cannot have been remotely substantial, as by then both it and its related company - Ultimo Brands International Limited - were trading as small companies, with meagre balance sheets.

Judging by the records at Companies House, the whole basis of Mone's reputation as a brilliant businesswoman needed to be called into question years ago. One leading Scottish businessman said at the time of her appointment to the Lords that Mone was "a small-time businesswoman with PR exposure far in excess of any success".

It is hard to disagree. Where Mone is brilliant, however, is creating a financial décolletage that has turned the heads of far too many over the years.

Michelle Mone the myth - was she ever the shrewd businesswoman she said she was?