One active directorship left for czar Mone

Scots businesswoman and recently-appointed Tory entrepreneurship czar, Michelle Mone, is now herself the director of only one active business after her controversial diet pill firm TrimSecrets became the latest company from which she has walked away.

Mone, who is due to be introduced to the House of Lords today, now has only one directorship in a company that is not dormant – the year-old Ubeauty, which has never filed any accounts.

The 44-year-old Tory peer, who has been touring the country advising on business start ups, left loss-making TrimSecrets last month.

The latest decision to quit has emerged just a day after it was reported that the lingerie firm that Baroness Mone founded with her former husband, and from which she also resigned from just weeks ago, has just posted yet more losses.

The Ultimo brand’s accounts published this week showed it recorded a retained loss of £388,000.

However, a spokesman for the peer insisted that she still had a number of business interests.

He said: “Lady Mone retains a growing portfolio of business interests as well as her work on the report for the government on how to help entrepreneurs behind their own start-up businesses in deprived areas.”

“Her work for the government is being done on a voluntary and unpaid basis.”

There was no response to a request for further details of the portfolio cited by the spokesman.

Baroness Mone’s other high profile activities include inspirational speaking, as well as television appearances and she has recently marketed jewellery on a shopping channel.

Companies House currently lists her as a director of UBeauty, set up last year and believed to be a vehicle for her fake tan business, and of MJM Media, a dormant firm.

The Peer is leading ‘The Mone Review’, in which she is driving to create business in Britain’s poorest neighbourhoods.

As part of her brief, she has been given the job of travelling around the country speaking to anyone from ex-convicts to single parents about setting up their own companies, for which she was given use of a government Jaguar.

She is also compiling a report about entrepreneurship and the difficulties of setting up small businesses in deprived areas for Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith.

But business leaders and politicians have openly voiced their dismay at her appointment, amid claims Ultimo Brands has been in serious trouble since 2011.

Labour MSP Neil Findlay said: “With each day I become less convinced that Michelle Mone is the right person to give advice to the next generation of businessmen and businesswomen.

“It appears she has very little left to offer by way of business acumen. David Cameron should reconsider her appointment.”