A former Labour MP and justice minister has been found not guilty of charges around his role in a fraudulent Covid-19 testing company.
Shahid Malik, 58, was MP for Dewsbury between 2005 and 2010 and served as a minister in three departments in Gordon Brown’s government.
Malik was one of five people charged with offences relating to RT Diagnostics, a company that prosecutors said was a “cash cow” set up to take advantage of the UK government’s expanding test-and-trace system in March 2021.
On Thursday, Malik was found not guilty of fraudulent trading, causing a public nuisance and money laundering in a trial at Bradford crown court, which was, unusually, conducted without a jury.
The trial began in October last year and jurors were sent out to start their deliberations in March. In April, they were discharged by Judge Smith after an allegation of jury tampering.
Smith took the decision to continue the trial without the jury, and that he would decide on the verdicts.
The court heard that Malik started the business with the pharmacist and former Labour councillor Faisal Shoukat, 39, when the third national lockdown was ending in March 2021.
Shoukat was found guilty of all three offences.
Paul Moore, 57, who had a senior role in RT Diagnostics and was Malik’s office manager when he was an MP, was cleared of causing a public nuisance and of fraudulent trading.
Lynn Connell, 64, a manager at the company, and Alexander Zarneh, 70, who was its clinical director, were also cleared of the same two offences.
Prosecutors said RT Diagnostics, which made £6.67m in three weeks, was set up in “shoddy and inadequate premises” in Halifax and gave out false negative results to customers.
The defence barrister, Jonathan Laidlaw KC, said Malik’s role in the business had been “very limited indeed” and he had acted as “a facilitator – putting the money up and making introductions”.
Giving his closing speech to jurors in March, Laidlaw said Malik never went to the premises when it was in operation.
He told the court that for most of the time the business was operating, Malik was out of the country and there was no evidence he was told about any of its issues while he was abroad.
Laidlaw said the fact that the former MP had made money from RT Diagnostics “can’t possibly be the basis for a guilty verdict”.
The court heard that as the third national lockdown was ending in March 2021, the government was looking to expand its test-and-trace system by increasing the number of laboratories offering PCR testing.
The defendants were accused of “taking advantage” of that process with an “inadequate and non-compliant” testing company which, prosecutor Jonathan Sandiford KC said, “generated a suspiciously low number of positive results”.
Sandiford said the Halifax laboratory was set up in inadequate premises with holes in the walls and ceilings, and rubbish strewn around.
Jurors heard that the company employed “numerous young people who had little or no training in the handling of Covid-19 samples” and set them to work with no social distancing and no personal protective equipment.
Along with Sadiq Khan, Malik was the first British-born Muslim to become an MP and the first to become a government minister. He was appointed as an international development minister in 2007 and he later had ministerial jobs at the Department of Justice and the Department for Communities and Local Government.
