How Mark Mone's collaborative approach shaped UWM
Chancellor Mone's Transformative Legacy event was held at the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship and UWM Welcome Center.
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Business Journals
01-07-2025
- Business Journals
How Mark Mone's collaborative approach shaped UWM
Expand Chancellor Mone's Transformative Legacy event was held at the UWM Lubar Entrepreneurship and UWM Welcome Center. KENNY YOO/MBJ 1 of 20
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Yahoo
Company linked to Baroness Mone must pay back £121m for ‘faulty' PPE, court told
A company linked to Tory peer Michelle Mone should pay back more than £121 million for breaching a Government contract for 25 million surgical gowns during the coronavirus pandemic, the High Court has heard. The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) is suing PPE Medpro for allegedly breaching a deal for the gowns, with lawyers for the Government telling the court they were 'faulty' because they were not sterile. The company, a consortium led by Baroness Mone's husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, was awarded Government contracts by the former Conservative administration to supply PPE during the pandemic, after she recommended it to ministers. Both have denied wrongdoing. The Government is seeking to recover the costs of the contract, as well as the costs of transporting and storing the items, which amount to an additional £8,648,691. PPE Medpro said it 'categorically denies' breaching the contract, and its lawyers claimed the company has been 'singled out for unfair treatment'. Opening the trial on Wednesday, Paul Stanley KC, for the DHSC, said: 'This case is simply about whether 25 million surgical gowns provided by PPE Medpro were faulty. 'It is, in short, a technical case about detailed legal and industry standards that apply to sterile gowns.' Mr Stanley said in written submissions the 'initial contact with Medpro came through Baroness Mone', with discussions about the contract then going through one of the company's directors, Anthony Page. Baroness Mone remained 'active throughout' the negotiations, Mr Stanley said, with the peer stating Mr Barrowman had 'years of experience in manufacturing, procurement and management of supply chains'. But he told the court Baroness Mone's communications were 'not part of this case', which was 'simply about compliance'. He said: 'The department does not allege anything improper happened, and we are not concerned with any profits made by anybody.' In court documents from May this year, the DHSC said the gowns were delivered to the UK in 72 lots between August and October 2020, with £121,999,219.20 paid to PPE Medpro between July and August that year. The department rejected the gowns in December 2020 and told the company it would have to repay the money, but this has not happened and the gowns remain in storage, unable to be used. In written submissions for trial, Mr Stanley said 99.9999% of the gowns should have been sterile under the terms of the contract, equating to one in a million being unusable. The DHSC claims the contract also specified PPE Medpro had to sterilise the gowns using a 'validated process', attested by CE marking, which indicates a product has met certain medical standards. He said 'none of those things happened', with no validated sterilisation process being followed, and the gowns supplied with invalid CE marking. He continued that 140 gowns were later tested for sterility, with 103 failing. He said: 'Whatever was done to sterilise the gowns had not achieved its purpose, because more than one in a million of them was contaminated when delivered. 'On that basis, DHSC was entitled to reject the gowns, or is entitled to damages, which amount to the full price and storage costs.' In his written submissions, Charles Samek KC, for PPE Medpro, said the 'only plausible reason' for the gowns becoming contaminated was due to 'the transport and storage conditions or events to which the gowns were subject', after they had been delivered to the DHSC. He added the testing did not happen until several months after the gowns were rejected, and the samples selected were not 'representative of the whole population', meaning 'no proper conclusions may be drawn'. He said the DHSC's claim was 'contrived and opportunistic' and PPE Medpro had been 'made the 'fall guy' for a catalogue of failures and errors' by the department. He said: 'It has perhaps been singled out because of the high profiles of those said to be associated with PPE Medpro, and/or because it is perceived to be a supplier with financial resources behind it. 'In reality, an archetypal case of 'buyer's remorse', where DHSC simply seeks to get out of a bargain it wished it never entered into, left, as it is, with over £8 billion of purchased and unused PPE as a result of an untrammelled and uncontrolled buying spree with taxpayers' money.' He also said there was a 'delicious irony' that Baroness Mone was mentioned in the DHSC's written submissions, when she had 'zero relevance to the contractual issues in this case'. Neither Baroness Mone nor Mr Barrowman is due to give evidence in the trial, and Baroness Mone did not attend the first day of the hearing on Wednesday. A PPE Medpro spokesperson said the company 'categorically denies breaching its obligations' and will 'robustly defend' the claim. The trial before Mrs Justice Cockerill is due to last five weeks, with a judgment expected in writing at a later date.
Yahoo
11-06-2025
- Yahoo
Outgoing UW-Milwaukee chancellor fields questions on Trump policies, engineering program cut
On the cusp of leaving the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Chancellor Mark Mone offered a turbulent forecast for higher education. "My prediction: consolidation, shakeouts," he told the Rotary Club of Milwaukee on June 10. "Higher education is in for some significant challenges." Mone, the second-longest-serving chancellor in UWM history, weathered his fair share of storms. His 11 years at the helm have included budget cuts, a battle over tenure protections, a pandemic, the inheritance and closure of two branch campuses, and a two-week period where protesters pitched tents on campus. Thomas Gibson, who has led UW-Stevens Point since 2021, takes over for Mone in July. At the 40-minute Rotary event, Mone talked up the importance of UWM's dual roles in research and open-access mission, which refers to widely accepting students more selective institutions would turn away. He highlighted the university's working with freshwater and cancer research, improved transfer pipelines and collaboration with local companies, such as Northwestern Mutual and Rockwell Automation. Mone also fielded questions from Rotary members about two Trump administration policies that are making waves on campus. Here are three takeaways from Mone's remarks: The Trump administration plans to pause new international student visas, revoke the visas of Chinese students and impose travel bans from a dozen countries. The policy changes have caused panic at some institutions. UWM enrolls about 1,300 international students. Mone anticipates as many as 500 fewer international students coming to campus this fall. "Right now, we're looking at some pretty challenging numbers on the international front," he said. UWM weathered a decline in international student enrollment just last year when, with little notice, the U.S. State Department cut the number of student visas from India. The university absorbed a $9 million financial hit due to the policy change, which Mone said UWM learned of in August 2024. More: Trump policies could lead to international student decline at UW-Madison, UWM, Concordia UWM is pushing to eliminate its materials science department, the only one in the state geared to the metal processing industries' needs. The move has generated concern in the business community and from U.S. Navy and Defense Department representatives. UWM officials have said suspending undergraduate admissions and reassigning the department's faculty will save $850,000 a year and help fill a $3.5 million engineering school budget gap. More: Kathleen Gallagher: UWM's making a big mistake to cut engineering program at critical time Mone, in his first public remarks on the program's elimination, blamed a decline in enrollment from about 48 students a decade ago to 24 students. Material sciences is the smallest of the engineering school's 11 programs. UWM can redeploy resources from the shuttered program to "growth areas," such as computer science and software development. Both programs have between 450 and 500 students. "That's just where, from a rational perspective, it makes sense to go down that path," Mone said. The Trump administration's cuts to federal research have sent shockwaves across research universities, including UWM. The National Institutes of Health, for example, wants to cut all new and existing grants to a 15% indirect cost rate, which the government pays to institutions to cover the administrative overhead associated with research. Indirect rates fund expenses like lab equipment and hazardous waste removal. UWM's indirect rate is between 30% and 35%, so the university is already operating administratively as one of the leanest, Mone said. The university receives about $55 million in federal research funding. UWM has seen some of its grants terminated, though Mone did not specify how many. A Zilber College of Public Health researcher recently told him their million dollar grant on suicide prevention had been cut. More concerning to Mone was the slowdown in the scientific approval process. The process for issuing grants to universities has been disrupted by layoffs, meeting cancellations and delays in scheduling meetings to review grant applications. He said this would have profound implications for society, from start-up activity to manufacturing to the environment. Both the indirect rate cuts and grant processing delays are being challenged in court. Kelly Meyerhofer has covered higher education in Wisconsin since 2018. Contact her at kmeyerhofer@ or 414-223-5168. Follow her on X (Twitter) at @KellyMeyerhofer. This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: UW-Milwaukee Chancellor Mark Mone reflects on 11-year tenure
