Daily Mail

THE FIRM WITH £440m CONTRACTS

THE lynchpin of Boris Johnson’s mass testing scheme Operation Moonshot is American company Innova Medical.

Formed in 2017 by private equity group Pasa Capital, its two contracts – to supply nearly 200million pregnancy test-style ‘lateral flow’ kits – are worth some £440million.

So how did it end up with enormous contracts to supply the British Government?

The answer lies in a terrace house in Wellingbor­ough, Northampto­nshire, the residence and office of Kimberley Thonger, 61, director of Disruptive Nanotechno­logy Ltd – whose last accounts, published in 2019, say it then had no reserves and debts of £2,368.

Mr Thonger once worked for DKNY shoes and Dr Marten’s and never previously had anything to do with healthcare.

In June he took on a co-director, Charles Palmer, 52, a surveyor who runs a property business in Harrow – the pair are understood to be friends.

Innova CEO Dan Elliott says he came across Mr Thonger through an organisati­on which deals with nanopartic­les which are used in medicines. He agreed to help Innova negotiate the bureaucrac­y and trials it had to go through to win its Government deal.

Mr Thonger and Mr Palmer are the UK distributo­rs of the Innova tests and will get ‘a few pence’ for every test sold – which will total millions.