THE company used by the Conservative peer Michelle Mone to sell a fake tan she says cost £1 million to develop is worth less than £25,000, according to its first set of accounts.

Ubeauty Global, which is behind Lady Mone’s UTan range, had net assets of just £23,636 last year, newly lodged files at Companies House have revealed.

The Glasgow-born entrepreneur, who was made a Tory peer in 2015, has said UTan took one of her former companies three years and seven figures to get right.

However Ubeauty Global’s accounts, which were signed off by Lady Mone last week and cover the period from November 2014 to 30 April 2016, are markedly more modest in scale.

They say the firm had current assets of £65,669 in April, including £46,703 of stocks.

There was also £17,413 “cash at bank and in hand” and £1,553 due from debtors.

However this was offset by £42,133 owed to creditors, leaving net assets of £23,536.

Lady Mone declares her directorship of the firm on her Lords register of interests, which says the “company’s business is tanning and beauty range of products, including UTan”.

In a clip now on Youtube, she explained the history of UTan at a trade fair in July 2012.

She said: “I spent about three years developing UTan and spent over £1m. I took on the best scientists, one of the best chemists, probably the person in the tanning industry worldwide.

“They then found out... what’s in the tanning products can cause cellulite. So they came out with USculpt technology which is in UTan, and it fights back against cellulite.

“It’s a great product. All the magazines are raving about it. I think it’s a real winner.”

Lady Mone’s website describes UTan as “one of the UK’s bestselling tan products”.

Ubeauty Global was originally established as a limited company in November 2014 with Ms Mone as its sole director and shareholder.

A year later, she converted it to an unlimited company, which meant she did not have to publish some financial data.

Last November, Lady Mone’s 24-year-old daughter Rebecca became a joint shareholder.

A dedicated website selling UTan is registered to Rebecca Mone at Ubeauty Global.

In December, the firm changed its original registered office with blue chip law firm Harper Macleod LLP to EDA Professional Services, a one-man tax advisers run by a part-time musician from a shared business unit in Queen’s Park, Glasgow.

Ms Mone, 45, said in her 2012 interview that Utan was “patent pending worldwide”.

Public records show the UK patent application was filed in May 2012 by MJM International Ltd, the Ultimo bra company Ms Mone and her then husband founded in 1996.

The initial application claimed the product “advantageously combines the effect of skin tanning and weight reduction”, and used ingredients “which may be obtained from the rainforest”.

However in October 2013, the UK Intellectual Property Office (IPO) flagged up what it called “major points” with the application, and said it had found three prior patents from elsewhere in the world “indicating lack of novelty or inventive step”.

Ms Mone nevertheless pressed ahead with the application, which remains ongoing.

An IPO spokesman said yesterday: “We can confirm that this application is live and currently going through the patent examination process.”

Lady Mone’s spokesman declined to comment.