Allison Ingersol – Bloomberg News July 23, 2019
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The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation Trust increased its stake in one of the U.K.’s largest for-profit prison operators.
The trust, the Gates foundation’s investment arm, added nearly 200,000 shares of Serco Group Plc in May, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. That took its holding to 3.74 million shares worth about 5.3 million pounds ($6.6 million), a tiny fraction of the foundation’s total assets of about $48 billion.
The Serco shares were added to the portfolio by an outside asset manager with discretion over individual investments, according to a spokesman for the trust, who said holdings are regularly evaluated for performance and fit. The foundation’s staff have no influence over the trust’s investment decisions, according to its website.
Serco runs six for-profit prisons in the U.K., all of which are nearly filled to capacity. Britain holds a bigger proportion of inmates in for-profit prisons than any other country except Australia, and the market is dominated by three companies: Serco, G4S Plc and Sodexo SA. In January, Serco was handed a 1.9 billion-pound, 10-year government contract to provide support services for asylum seekers.
The company has had its run-ins with the government. A Serco unit earlier this month agreed to pay 19.2 million pounds to settle a six-year probe into false accounting related to overcharging for electronic tagging of criminals. And that contract for asylum support services came after millions of pounds of penalties in recent years for missing contractual performance requirements.
The Gates foundation acquired an initial stake of more than 600,000 Serco shares in 2014, shortly after liquidating its stake in G4S, the world’s biggest security-services provider, which drew criticism for its contracts with Israel’s prison system.
The only point I want to make here is that businesses run for profit (shares/dividends & market forces lol) have an element of risk, or should have an element or risk. There is no risk, or, almost no risk running prisons or providing government services. Why the feck are they handing out 10yr contracts? One regular commenter on here attempted to tell me that right-wing regimes want smaller governance and less regulation. Here we have an ultra-right-wing regime, probably the most rightwing regime in British history, busy finding more and bigger ways to increase the state via for-profit scams to waste as much public money as possible This is fascism pure and simple.
Most UK public services are contracts, contracts that one, are not managed properly and two, they allow for massive corruption and fraud. A simple analogy: simple cleaning contract, it requires 10 cleaners, over 12 months, but they employ 7/8 cleaners over that period. The council does not monitor the contract or the person responsible for monitoring the contact takes a thick brown envelope. The company providing the service is £50-£75,000 up. And this is happening all over the UK.
And yet Halfwit Carl it was the far LEFT Champagne socialist BLAIR that privitsed them!!……………You can not replace a stupid bigot like you!! DO ONE you FAR LEFT Anti British POS!!
Guess the inmates will be among the first to get vaccinated!
British and PROUD: Blair was and still is considered to be more rightwing than Thatcher. She considered Tony Blair to be her NATURAL SUCCESSOR. lol, lol, lol.
It is also widely understood that the UK has NEVER had a real socialist government.
I rather enjoy your low-level abuse. What can one say to a claimed person that hides behind a fake identity? I can think of many, but ‘fake’ is pretty good.