The government lifted the normal tending process in a panic, and numerous dodgy financial firms starting buying PPE to make money.
Again, the story isn't that they sought to profit from chaos, it's that they got the contract. Can we focus on that? Instead of saying "they were trying to profit", can we start from "of course they were trying to profit, but why wasn't the tender made public, and who made the decision to give it to them?"
The FT article goes into much more detail about the actual procurement process and the surroundings issues.
> ”Around 16,000 potential suppliers contacted a 500-person buying team set up by the Cabinet Office in March to offer to supply kit for hospital staff."
This is because one of them is actual journalism and one of them is a biased write-up of pointless open source research.