Meeting with former UK prime minister and his chief advisor withheld from official records, according to leaked documents
Former British prime minister Boris Johnson and his chief adviser Dominic Cummings met with Peter Thiel, co-founder and chairman of Palantir, in 2019, months before the US spy-tech company landed a key role in the UK's COVID-19 response, according to papers seen by The Guardian.
The meeting, which was kept from the official record, took place on August 28, 2019, months before the UK government began forming its response to the pandemic, which would see Palantir awarded £60 million in contracts without competition, starting with a contract awarded for just £1.
The US vendor went on to win a £330 million piece of work to provide the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), which the world's largest healthcare provider said would be core to recovery from its pandemic backlog.
Aside from Oracle, none of the global vendors in analytics and data science bid for the contract, leading to concerns over vendor lock-in.
Thiel's meeting with the prime minister and his most influential advisor was detailed in a cache of leaked documents, seen by The Guardian after they were obtained by the transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets.
It adds to the timeline leading up to Palantir's controversial contract award for the Federated Data Platform.
According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Palantir had already begun promoting itself to the UK government in an unconventional way. In July 2019, UK boss Louis Mosley hosted a meal attended by David Prior, chair of NHS England, after which Mosley wrote to Prior to offer a demonstration of Palantir's software and an introduction to CEO Alex Karp. Prior replied, copying in NHSX chief Matthew Gould, who he said "may already be in the loop," according to the publication.
Months after the meeting, in October 2019, Prior and Gould were both at a meeting with other tech giants, including Amazon and Microsoft. Revealed by The Register, the meeting described a health record organizing program that would create a "single, standardized, event-based, longitudinal patient record" repository for as many as 65 million people across Britain.
Ming Tang, chief data and analytics officer for NHS England, led the NHS plan for a COVID Data Store in 2020, which resulted in deals with Microsoft, AWS, Google, UK AI biz Faculty, and Palantir.
The Reg understands that NHSX put forward an options appraisal for vendors for the data store, and that Palantir and the other vendors were picked from the list.