With a permanent deployment of approximately 150 police on the hill reported for the past half year, the atmosphere is intimidating, to say the least. Since August 2022 up until the time of writing, the assembly to defend the hill has reported constant harassment of those trying to use the park, including of kids coming to play basketball or simply hang out. It has counted over forty arrests in that time, as well as other acts of violence and tear gas used against local residents who refuse to back down in the face of state intimidation. Yet the assembly has sustained resistance in myriad forms – from demos, to intergenerational festivities with traditional dancing and choirs.

Strefi Hill is more than just an inner city park. It’s a precious gathering space at the heart of a spirited neighbourhood that successive governments have sought – but failed – to subdue and assimilate. It’s a haven for anarchists, refugees and other outsiders to organise or socialise, but also a valuable community space with an open theatre, basketball courts and a playground.

And it’s a refuge for wildlife too. Wild tortoises live on the hill, and the animal has become its symbol: ancient, free, and vulnerable – but ultimately tough in its weather-beaten shell.

Since our interview, we’ve dug into the companies carving up this precious space for personal gain, hoping to inspire solidarity. We traced the financial interests back to faceless private equity firms in Northern Europe and the US – and found some wealthy Greek dynasties along the way.

Mural for Strefi Hill. Image: Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill

The investors: PRODEA

Parent companies: Invel & Castlelake

€1m (£850k) in financing for the Strefi project is provided by Prodea, with €800,000 (£687k) supplied by Athens city council.

Prodea is a property developer listed on the Athens stock exchange. Its owner describes it as “the largest Real Estate Investment Company (“REIC”) in Greece in terms of assets”, and it has at least fifty subsidiaries – mostly based in Greece and Cyprus.

The majority of Prodea’s investments are in commercial property in the form of offices. Over a third of its portfolio is rented out to the National Bank of Greece, while 10% is leased to the Greek supermarket chain Sklavenitis. It is currently in discussions about participation in the controversial Elliniko megaproject on the site of Athens’ former airport, among the world’s biggest urban redevelopment schemes.

According to company accounts, the firm appears to be doing well financially. It made just over €98m (£84m) in profit in 2022, although this was a significant drop from the previous year’s profits of around €128m (£110m).

Prodea’s chairman and president is Christophoros “Chris” Papachristophorou, who is also managing partner of the parent company, Invel. Educated at the London School of Economics, Papachristophorou cut his teeth in the world of property as global head of RREEF Opportunistic Investments, a real estate investment manager then owned by Deutsche Bank. Several other former RREEF and Deutsche Bank real estate personnel populate the Invel and Prodea management teams. This includes Papachristophorou’s wife Marianna, a London Business School graduate who owns a £5m home in Chelsea.

In an indication of the company’s potential proximity to government, another Deutsche Bank alumni and recent Invel Partner, Alexis Pipilis, happens to be Facebook friends with Sofia Mitsotakis – daughter of the current Greek Prime Minister.

Chris Papachristophorou

Invel

Prodea is owned by Invel, a Jersey-headquartered, multinational property investor and asset manager. The company specialises in “real estate and distressed debt opportunities across Europe”. It invites investment firms to contribute money alongside its own in the purchase of properties that are not considered to be profitable enough, and redevelops them.

However, Invel’s most high-profile investment isn’t a luxury hotel or a chain of supermarkets – it’s the property division of the National Bank of Greece (NBG).

Back in the early 2010s, the institutional response to the Greek debt crisis was to provide loans on the condition of massive structural changes, such as the privatisation of public assets and the implementation of austerity measures. Consequently, the real estate subsidiary of the bailed-out National Bank of Greece, then known as Pangaea, was sold off to a consortium led by Invel—a company that had been in existence for less than a year.

And Invel got a bargain. It purchased a majority share for just €653m (£566m) – however €450m was paid for by a loan provided by the bank itself (at just 2.75% interest), meaning Invel only actually paid €203m (£174m) at the time. The deal initially gave Invel access to nearly €1bn in 252 properties; as the country emerged from the worst days of the crisis, the value has since multiplied to nearly €3bn (£2.6bn) euros in 380 properties. It acquired the remaining stake in the Pangaea in 2019, renaming the business Prodea.

The Steinmetz Connection

Crisis profiteering isn’t the only unsavoury aspect of Invel’s story. It would probably like to distance itself from its most inconvenient bedfellow, disgraced diamond merchant and Israel’s former richest citizen, Beny Steinmetz.

Beny Steinmetz launched Invel back in 2013 with $400m (£343m) start-up capital provided via his firm, BSG Real Estate, part of the convoluted Beny Steinmetz Group (BSG) business empire which spans minerals, fossil fuels, property and private equity. He hired Papachristophorou as Invel’s “man on the ground” in Greece and Cyprus, and was partner at the firm until his legal woes mounted five years later. Papachristophorou remains CEO of another company in that empire, BSG Resources.

In 2020, Steinmetz was convicted of “the creation of an organized criminal group” by a Romanian court, in a case concerning the bribery of public officials for access to real estate. He was sentenced to five years’ prison in absentia.

Beny Steinmetz

A year later, Steinmetz was convicted of bribery again – this time in a case involving tens of millions of dollars worth of payments to the wife of Guinea’s then dictator, Lansana Conté, in return for mining rights. The site concerned is one of the world’s largest known deposits of iron ore in Guinea’s Simandou mountain range, home to critically endangered Western chimpanzees. In 2008, Rio Tinto – which had been given exclusive rights to the mine (and still enjoys concessions in the project) – had its license revoked. Permits were instead granted to BSG Resources, a company with no history of iron ore mining.

Steinmetz and his associates spent years trying to shut down the story through aggressive PR and legal tactics, as well as (not having quite caught on the first time) further bribery attempts.

Then in May 2022, a World Bank arbitration panel ruled that the mining rights had indeed been obtained through bribery. Yet in spite of having been sentenced to a total of ten years in prison by courts in two jurisdictions, Steinmetz appears to be walking free while he appeals his second conviction.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert described Steinmetz as “the last guy you would want as an enemy”, and it no doubt helps to have family with access to power; his nephew was a partner in Jared Kushner’s property business, Kushner Companies. Steinmetz enjoys such a privileged relationship with Greece that despite the mounting evidence of corruption, a court in Athens rejected a Romanian extradition request in April 2022. He said he was “grateful to Greek justice” for this intervention.

A second figure who has been embroiled in the scandal is Shimon Menahem, another of Steinmetz’s nephews (in this case, by marriage), who invested heavily in Invel. In 2014, a Greek financial regulator noted that Papachristophorou and Menahem jointly controlled numerous companies, including exercising indirect joint control of at least one of Invel’s entities.

This map provides only a snapshot of Steinmetz’ nebulous corporate network, and many of his firms – as well as Invel’s extraordinary list of companies – are based in the tax havens Jersey, Guernsey and Luxembourg. Capitalism thrives on ambiguous corporate structures, and Steinmetz’ ability to evade the criminal justice system so far is testament to that.

Castlelake steps in

Following Steinmetz’s fall from grace, global investment firm Castlelake L.P. came to the rescue, acquiring significant shares in several Invel firms. Castlelake is now therefore the ultimate owner of Prodea, while Invel’s role in the relationship is that of a shell company – basically, a vehicle to run Prodea.

Castlelake is a multinational private equity firm specialising in planes and property. Although based in the US, the firm manages $20bn (£17bn) in assets through various funds – most of which are invested in Europe, according to financial databases.

It is headed by the founders, Rory O’Neill and Evan Carruthers. Both of them previously worked at the agribusiness conglomerate – and world’s largest private company – Cargill.

Evan Carruthers, Castlelake Co-CEO

Rory O’Neill, Castlelake Co-CEO

Engineers: Aktor

Parent company: Ellaktor

The engineering work on the hill is being carried out by Aktor. According to members of the assembly, this is being done via TOMI AVETE, an Aktor subsidiary specialising in urban developments.

Aktor is owned by Ellaktor, a major Greek construction and engineering conglomerate which operates in over thirty countries, notably in Eastern Europe and the Gulf. It works in construction, quarrying and property development, as well as building and running wind farms and wastewater treatment plants. The Group as a whole has benefited significantly from prominent public-private development projects for decades. It was, until a few years ago, led by two warring families, the Kallitsantsis clan, and the powerful Bobolas dynasty – which also owned controlling stakes in leading Greek media outlets. It is now headed by banker and private equity trader, Efthymios Bouloutas, who was convicted of corruption charges in 2018 associated with (mis)management of the now-defunct Laiki Bank. He evaded prison, walking away with a small fine.

Ellaktor has been called Greece’s second-largest producer of wind energy, running a dozen or so such farms, and now branching out into offshore wind power. Wind energy has been particularly controversial in Greece over the past couple of years, with deregulation resulting in farms being plonked on mountain tops in ecologically-sensitive habitats, and communities mobilising against the developments. Aktor also had a 5% stake in the gold mine at Skouries, Northern Greece, until this was bought by Eldorado Gold in 2020. Locals and supporters have mounted a decades-long, historic campaign of resistance to the ecologically-disastrous plan, and the mine is still not yet in production.

Efthymios Bouloutas, Ellaktor CEO

Returning to the present day, Aktor is one of several companies implicated in February’s catastrophic train collision near Tempe, Greece’s deadliest rail disaster. In 2014, Aktor was awarded the contract to upgrade the signalling system on approximately 500km of the Athens-Thessaloniki line, in a joint venture with French rail giant Alstom. But a recent report by Reporters United and Investigate Europe found that the two companies repeatedly failed to carry out their duties, and instead spent years bickering and demanding a larger contract. This was eventually approved in 2021 for an extra €13m (£11m). However, despite having been given more money, the companies were apparently still unable to get along. This led to Aktor subcontracting everything to Alstom, which had begun the work by the time of the crash.

Greek Prime Minister Mitsotakis has attributed the disaster, which killed at least 57 people, to “tragic human error”; industry experts have said that an adequate signalling system would have prevented the accident from happening.

Neither trains nor joint ventures seem to be the company’s forte. Aktor was part of another joint venture that was awarded a multi-billion euro contract to extend the Doha metro. The consortium become embroiled in a dispute with a subcontractor, which took it to court resulting in a $98.5m (£79m) fine. Aktor had to pay a substantial share of the damages.

Despite its record, Ellaktor has bid to lead the consortium that would run the new Thessaloniki metro, once completed. It has been involved in the construction of the network, although the work has been hampered by delays for years, and the company again ran into dispute with a contractor.

Protracted construction projects have resulted in a significant backlog and debt for Aktor, and it made losses of €155.5m (£133m) in 2020. Despite it being the Group’s largest company, it is now being sold off to major competitor Intrakat for €100m, in a deal expected to be completed before the end of the year.

Today, Dutch private equity firm Reggeborgh is Ellaktor’s largest shareholder, with a total stake of approximately 45%. Until recently, it also had a large shareholding in another major Greek construction firm, GEK Terna. Reggeborgh has been described as the investment vehicle of the Dutch Wessels family, which is behind the conglomerate VolkerWessels.

The next largest shareholder (with roughly 30%) is Motor Oil, a Greek petrochemicals firm chaired by billionaire shipping tycoon Vardis Vardinogiannis.

Police on Strefi Hill. Image: Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill

The managers: UNISON

Parent company: ISS

According to the Open Assembly for the Defence of Strefi Hill, the installation of the CCTV cameras, tree-cutting, fencing, concreting and cleaning has been contracted to a Greek firm called Unison.

Unison describes itself as Greece’s “market leader in the facility management industry”. Set up in the late seventies as ISS Group Hellas, it was rebranded in 2021.

Unison carries out much of the same work as its parent company, the global outsourcing giant ISS. It also has a human resources subsidiary specialising in temping work, and says that it is the first company in Greece to have received a temping license.

ISS

Danish outsourcer ISS has its roots in the security business in the early 20th century, before it branched out into cleaning, catering, site and equipment maintenance. It is now a facilities management multinational, smaller than the behemoths Sodexho and Compass Group, but larger than the British outsourcing firm Mitie. It is led by CEO Jacob Aarup-Andersen, an investment banker.

Unison represents particularly marginal revenues for ISS, at less than 1% – and isn’t even included in ISS’s list of significant subsidiaries. ISS’s most important market is the UK, where the majority (15%) of its global income is generated. It is headquartered in Copenhagen, Denmark.

ISS is a publicly-traded company. Kirkbi A/S, a private holding of the Danish Kirk Kristiansen family (owner of the world’s most profitable toy company, Lego), has a 17% shareholding in the business.

British-based private equity firm Longview Partners has a smaller (7%) shareholding. Ownership of Longview can be traced back to Ernesto Bertarelli, Swiss billionaire and until recently, Switzerland’s richest person. Bertarelli recently bought a £92m home in Belgravia, London using wealth which ultimately derives from his family’s former pharmaceutical business.

Conclusion

Tugging on the threads of Strefi Hill unravels a patchwork of companies and individuals united in self-interest and corporate greed, from faceless US investors and a corrupt Israeli diamond merchant, to an LSE-educated banker and a Swiss billionaire. The cases of Aktor and Steinmetz show how proximity to power means they can keep getting the contracts, no matter how corrupt or incompetent they may be.

These corporate interests can be traced far beyond Athens, with wealth being funnelled back to countries such as the UK, Switzerland, Netherlands, Denmark and the US. The attack on the hill is part of a global struggle against the suppression of dissent, alternative lifestyles and free public spaces. But with collective resistance and solidarity, victory against the devastating forces of gentrification is within reach.

Click to enlarge

Appendix: Addresses

See the links for more locations

• Prodea

  Athens: Chrisospiliotissis 9, 105 60.

• InvelAthens: (same as Prodea) Chrisospiliotissis 9, 105 60.London: 1st Floor, 26 Grosvenor Gardens, London, SW1W 0GT.(See the link for more)

• Castlelake

  London: 15 Sackville Street, W1S 3DJ.

• Unison

  Athens: Andrea Siggrou 194, Kallithea 176 71.

• ISS

  UK: 1 Brooklands Drive Brooklands, Weybridge, Surrey, KT13 0SL

• Ellaktor

  Athens: Ermou 25, Kifisia 145 64.

• Aktor: As Ellaktor

The post The corporate plunder of Strefi Hill appeared first on Corporate Watch.

For analysis on the previous year’s flights, see here.

The flights and the people

In terms of destinations, deportation charter flights in 2022 followed similar patterns to 2021 and previous years. Albania was by far the most frequent destination, with 35 flights deporting approximately 900 people, more than all other nationalities combined. Next were three EU countries: Romania, Poland and Lithuania, receiving 11, 8 and 5 flights, for an approximate total of 300, 145 and 94 people respectively. Flights to Ghana and Nigeria (21 people), Jamaica (7 people), Vietnam (40 people) and Zimbabwe (2 flights, 35 people) accounted for the rest. Five flights scheduled to Iraq, Jamaica, Lithuania, Poland and Rwanda were cancelled.

The most recent immigration statistics published by the Home Office state that the “vast majority of enforced returns” were of so-called Foreign National Offenders (“FNO”). These were overwhelmingly to European countries, but also included Ghana, Jamaica, Nigeria and Zimbabwe. The Windrush scandal showed how deportations to these post-colonial territories are systemically racist in nature, and particularly susceptible to procedural abuse. Many of those on the planes will be more at home in the UK than anywhere else, regardless of any irregularities in their immigration status.

The use of charter flights to deport criminalised people is a point we are continually reminded of by politicians to serve as their self-evident justification. Home Office propaganda focuses on the sometimes severe crimes of a few deportees. Yet according to activists and detainee support groups, such as volunteers with the Association of Visitors to Immigration Detention, most people are picked up for minor offences. Many deportees on these flights have human trafficking claims, and many have lived most of their lives in the UK. Despite extensive community ties, these people nevertheless face the additional punishment of becoming completely cut off from those communities after serving their criminal sentence.

There is also an ever-increasing conflation of so-called “foreign criminals” and asylum seekers. The Nationality and Borders Act, which entered into force last summer, criminalised “irregular arrival” so that anyone who comes autonomously to the UK to seek asylum can readily be declared and convicted as a criminal. This intentional confusion between asylum seekers and foreign criminals was evident in reporting on the cancelled Iraq flight; comments from the Home Office meant it was originally described as carrying foreign criminals, when those due to fly were later found to be refused asylum seekers.

Over the years we have seen how the government targets huge numbers of people ahead of a charter flight in the hope that not all will be able to receive the timely legal advice needed to stay their deportation. The 18 May charter flight to Jamaica was originally scheduled for more than 100 people, but left with just seven on board after many were able to cancel their deportation pending a legal review. Several dozen detainees at Colnbrook IRC, not due to be deported that day, had also protested the flight inside the detention centre in a bid to prevent three people from being taken.

Targeting Albanians

The Home Office’s immigration statistics report shows that Albanians accounted for 25% of total “enforced returns” from the UK, as well as a majority of FNO deportations. The deportation of Albanians, not only as “criminals” but “Channel crossers”, was key to Home Office propaganda throughout the last year showing its resolve to “stop the boats”. The Refugee Council estimated that 15,569 Albanians crossed the Channel in 2022 – by far the leading nationality – but they had an asylum acceptance rate at first decision of just 16%. Unable to deport asylum seekers from other countries due largely to the ending of the Dublin mechanism after Brexit – a spectacular own goal for previous Conservative governments – the deportation of Albanian asylum seekers has become a convenient substitute.

Albanians have become a catch-all scapegoat for the Home Office, which simultaneously alludes to them as dangerous foreign criminals, bogus asylum seekers and Channel crossers in its press releases and social media posts. The current rhetoric against Albanians is openly persecutory, with Minister of Immigration Robert Jenrick recently celebrating:

“the fantastic staff who are working round the clock to find the Albanians, to detain them, to put them onto coaches, to take them to the airport and get them back to Tirana“.

Following on previous agreements, in December the UK and Albanian governments agreed a new deal which would reportedly allow “13,000 who crossed the Channel last year to be removed from Britain on weekly deportation flights” by fast-tracking asylum claims and prohibiting Albanians from accessing modern slavery protections. We expect Albanians to continue being a prime target for deportation charter flights into 2023, with Rishi Sunak recently telling Piers Morgan they will “ratchet up over the year”.

The companies

Two airlines raked in almost all of the money doing deportations for the Home Office in 2022: Spanish airline Privilege Style, and Stansted-based Titan Airways. Both should be well-known to anti-deportation activists, and have been lining their pockets helping successive British and other European governments ruin people’s lives for years. These two companies have proven themselves consistently the UK’s most frequent deporters, and key cogs in this misery machine.

In 2022 these two airlines lent their aircraft and crew to the Home Office 46 times, three-quarters of all mass deportation flights. But analysing the flight numbers of the mass deportations we identified shows aircraft from other companies flying under Titan (AWC) and Privilege Style (PVG) codes. This implies that these two companies sometimes subcontract out their dirty work, and were potentially responsible for 54 – or 87% – of flights overall (4).

The government seems to have turned to other companies for its less frequent and much longer deportations to countries like Zimbabwe and Vietnam. The other airlines identified deported people to countries beyond the weekly flights to Albania and EU member states, and were likely to have been contracted through deportation fixer Air Partner (see more in our recent profile here). Hi Fly, the Portuguese charter airline which led the Home Office’s pre-Brexit drive of asylum seekers in late 2020, deported seven people to Jamaica on 18 May and then nine people to Zimbabwe on 7 September. It also appears to have used its partner flyPOP’s plane 9H-PTP to deport a total of 21 people to Ghana and Nigeria in June.

Hi Fly appeared to have silently stepped back from deportation charters after being exposed by Corporate Watch in 2020, but has since proven it is still happy to go the distance to tear apart a family for the Home Office, despite its proclaimed support for refugee causes.

Iberojet, formerly Evelop!, is another Spanish airline with a history of collaboration with the Home Office. Last year it deported 40 people to Vietnam in January, and 26 to Zimbabwe in March (see our 2021 profile on Iberojet/Evelop! here). Along with Air Nostrum, Iberojet has just been awarded another contract to carry out Spain’s deportation flights for the next 16 months.

There was one exception to the above pattern. In November a new airline began performing deportation work on the regular Albania route for the Home Office: Corendon Airlines. According to the Berlin-based No Border Assembly and their Deportation Alarm project, the holiday airline first entered the charter deportation market during the 2020 Covid pandemic. The company headquarters are in Turkey and Malta, however its Dutch subsidiary, Corendon Dutch Airlines, flies all its deportation charters for the company, often with the same Boeing 737-registered PH-CDH. Apart from its three flights last year, at the time of writing Corendon has already flown two deportation charter flights for the Home Office in 2023 (Romania on 31 January and Albania on 16 February). This company, a proven deportation provider to EU states, may continue to carry out work for the Home Office in future as it appears to be a cheaper alternative than its former go-to charter firms, Titan and Privilege Style.

The cancelled Rwanda flight

Despite regular deportation flights taking off each week, public consciousness of the UK’s deportation planes in 2022 was dominated by one which never took off: Privilege Style’s scheduled flight from Boscombe Down MOD to Kigali, Rwanda. Investigations revealed that the people forced onto that plane were physically attached to their seats with waist restraint belts by Mitie guards who used “pain-inducing techniques” to stop them self-harming as a way to resist their expulsion. The Privilege Style crews may have heard, if not directly witnessed, this torture, but still appeared willing to take off nonetheless. Luckily this flight was halted by an eleventh-hour intervention by the European Court of Human Rights, and no other has been scheduled while the UK’s policy to deport asylum seekers to Rwanda is undergoing legal challenges in the courts.

Following campaigning from anti-deportation activists in the UK and Spain—including interrupting the World Aviation Festival and going to Privilege Style’s headquarters to present it the “Worst Airline in the World Award” (a golden plane crashing into a pile of shit) Privilege Style announced on 18 October that they would not fly any future deportation flights to Rwanda. While Titan and AirTanker have made similar statements, Hi Fly and Iberojet refuse to make the same commitment. However, Privilege Style’s apparent change of tune on Rwanda in the face of public pressure did not stop it from continuing to fly deportations for the Home Office (or other European countries). In fact, just the day after its announcement it deported 32 people to Albania, followed by another three deportations to Poland and Albania within the next month.

After 17 November there were no further deportation charter flights flown by Privilege Style from the UK in 2022. This led some to wonder if the “Home Office’s deportation airline of last resort” had pulled out of the market for good, or perhaps was being punished for withdrawing its cooperation for flights to Rwanda. But on 2 February 2023, Privilege Style again flew another mass deportation to Albania – proving it remains one of Europe’s most unabashed deportation profiteers, so far unfazed by collective actions.

The money

The costs to the Home Office for all its chartered deportation flights in 2022 are as follows:

The per monthly breakdown for the final four months of the year is:

Based on the FOI data, we estimate that the total yearly costs for the 62 flights (plus five cancelled) to have been £12,145,000 (5), slightly more than the £11,744,522.33 from 2021. This excludes fees paid to Mitie for the guards to keep the people in their seats (at least three “escorts” per deportee), as well as other costs which may have been billed to the Home Office later. We estimate the average per-flight cost in 2022 to have been £180,000, but the real costs will fluctuate depending upon the destination and airline, amongst other factors.

This year’s data provided more insight into per-flight costs than previous investigations. Flights to distant destinations cost the Home Office substantially more than deportations to European countries. Costs in November were £100,000 higher than December despite being for basically the same four flights, three to Albania and a fourth to Romania. The difference: a plane had been scheduled to deport people to Jamaica on 9 November. This flight was cancelled, and would have likely cost substantially more had it gone ahead.

Cancelled flights therefore still entail significant costs. 19 flights were scheduled in both the three-month period June to September and the four-month period September to January. Total costs were £40,000 more in the earlier period despite the cancellation of two more flights, including Privilege Style’s planned deportation to Rwanda.

We can also see that charter airlines like Privilege Style or Titan that brag about serving VIPs, politicians, sports teams and the like are the most expensive, yet are still used most often. Comparing average costs in October (£176,407.86) to December (£143,937.30) we see that per-flight costs were around £30,000 lower in December for similar destinations. The difference this time: deportations in December were carried out by Corendon, and not Privilege Style (other than the two constants done by Titan each month).

Looking ahead

Charter deportations represent a minority of all deportations from the UK (6). Deportation charters have been consistently criticised for their exorbitant costs alongside the relatively small number of deportees who end up on the flights after people make their cases for remaining in the UK to the courts. However, claiming per-flight costs are too high or the number of people is too low to justify specially chartering an entire plane misses the point of these mass deportations. Above all, they are meant to serve as spectacular displays of immigration enforcement action for the government in power at the time. For a premium, ministers get to Tweet regularly about mass deportations of foreign criminals and other scapegoats to prove to anti-migrant constituents their dedication to stopping “illegal immigration” or punishing those who “game the asylum system”.

Aside from pandering to their base, the Home Office is also likely happy to fork over huge sums for deportation charters because it imagines that they deter others from coming to the UK. Since at least August 2020, rapid response deportation attempts have been a key tactic to “stop the boats”, and were recently reprioritised by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. However, as small boat arrivals continue to rise year-on-year, while only generating 45% of total asylum claims in 2022, this strategy has proven not only unsuccessful but unnecessary. The Rwanda plan which was supposed to deliver a deterrent effect has apparently not fazed anyone waiting in France for their chance to cross, but rather only re-traumatised survivors of torture and led others who have had to flee to the UK for their lives to now contemplate suicide here.

In lieu of the dramatic Rwanda charter deportations Home Secretary Suella Braverman “dreams” of seeing, last year shows the much more mundane (but no less violent and abusive) reality of a charter deportation system churning through our communities each week. Albanians are currently prime targets, but this could easily become other nationalities and cohorts, especially as the predominant nationalities of Channel crossers shift. We saw glimpses of this last year with the deportation charter flights to Vietnam in January and then the cancelled flight (for “operational reasons”) of Kurdish people to Iraq in May, the first planned flight to the country in a decade. These came off the back of the large number of Vietnamese people and Iraqis travelling to the UK by boat in late 2021 and early 2022, and, like deportations to Albania, could be intended to dissuade others from those specific countries from following.

Although deportations to Rwanda are currently not happening due to legal challenges, and there is no longer a returns agreement for European countries, we know the government is keen to negotiate other “third-country” agreements for the deportation of asylum seekers. It is now clearing the legal ground necessary to do such returns at scale with its recently-published Illegal Migration Bill, currently in its second reading in the House of Commons.

If efforts to allow the mass deportation of people who have not even had the opportunity to seek asylum are ever successful, we must assume that the government will make full use of charter flights if for no other reason than for the dramatic statement that a deportation plane taking off makes. The bottom line, however, is that for these flights to go ahead, someone has to be willing to fly them. We saw last year that even the very worst companies can be pushed into refusing to carry out this work through sustained international action. Therefore we must continue to pressure all the deportation profiteers to ensure that when the Home Office tries to carry out its next deportation charter, there is no one left they can turn to to help them do it.

Appendix

The post 2022 UK charter deportations: a balance sheet appeared first on Corporate Watch.

In this update of our company investigation on Mitie, we found that:

• In the last financial year, it reported a record annual turnover of around £4 billion, up 58% since 2021.
• Mitie runs 50% of the Home Office’s migrant detention facilities. It also supplies the guards that enforce Home Office deportations. Earlier in 2022, Mitie was investigated for “suspected anti-competitive conduct” after winning yet more lucrative detention deals, although this investigation is now closed.
• Mitie’s largest single shareholders, Stephen and Caroline Butt, donated £52,000 to the Conservative Party between 2015 and 2021.
• It has had a track record of paying low wages and attempting to pay workers less than minimum wage, especially when it worked in the business of care homes.
• A huge area of profit growth comes from the chilling push towards increased surveillance technology across many sectors.

Do you have any information you’d like to share about Mitie? Get in touch!

Business basics

In the 2022 financial year, Mitie Group Plc recorded a record annual turnover of around £4 billion, up 58% since 2021. Just over a third (38%) of its sales are to business customers. Mitie’s customer range is vast, ranging from retailers including Co-op, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Ikea, to the BBC, major banks, defence companies and a raft of government departments. Profit and shareholder returns have been rising, in part through securing significant government contracts during the pandemic, and also since it bought Interserve for £120 million in 2020. This year has seen the company secure £2.1 billion in new contract wins, more than in the past three years combined.

Mitie employs around 72,000 people. Its head office is in London, with regional offices around the UK. According to the 2022 annual report, it has some small subsidiaries registered in other European countries, in Africa (Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana) and in the United Arab Emirates. However, over 95% of its turnover comes from the UK.

Profit margins differ between Mitie’s business areas but detention is amongst the most lucrative. The company’s services are grouped into several divisions. These are, in order of revenue in the 2022 annual report:

• Business Services (£1.5 billion). This division delivers security, cleaning and office services. It generated £429 million from Covid-related government contracts providing testing centres and security in quarantine hotels. It also began a contract worth over £53 million in September 2022 to provide security services at Home Office ‘contingency accommodation’ centres. It recently launched ‘Mitie Intelligence Services’, which allegedly “integrates intelligence, technology and people”. Key clients for this sector include the BBC, B&Q, Marks & Spencer, BAE Systems and Transport for London. See below for more detail on this sector.
• Central Government and Defence (£669 million). Mitie continues to win lucrative government contracts. This includes maintenance for “1% of the UK land mass” reserved for defence training. Mitie also has a contract with the DWP ‘helping’ people who lost work during the pandemic.
• Communities (£460 million) This division focuses primarily on healthcare, education and is providing an increasing number of outsourcing services to universities.
• Technical Services (£973 million) Working mainly in the private sector, but since the buyout of Interserve this division is now picking up PFI contracts. According to Mitie, this sector provides clients with “solutions to their Green Energy, Decarbonisation, Connected Workspace and Mobile Telecoms challenges”.
• Specialist Services (£373 million).  Specialist services’ operating profit is 8.8% – the highest for all divisions. The majority of this comes via Care & Custody providing “public services in immigration, criminal justice and secure healthcare”, revenue for which has increased by 25% to £136 million. The Care & Custody sector has contracts worth nearly £518 million on the order book, up from almost £445 million in 2021.

It’s pretty much certain that most people in the UK will shop at, or use services that help keep Mitie’s profit margins up.

Cashing in on Covid

Mitie cashed in on the pandemic when it was in big financial trouble. But when Covid hit, Mitie’s fortunes turned around. It sucked up lucrative government contracts and managed to halt profit warnings.

Despite these lucrative contracts, workers at a Mitie test centre caught Covid in January 2021, raised the alarm and questioned safety measures. The firm claimed that it followed test and trace guidance and the site was deep cleaned. Meanwhile, Mitie also provided cleaners to hostels for Southwark Council who worked for poverty wages without adequate PPE. And despite raking in millions from Covid-related work, in November 2021 it slashed workers’ guaranteed pay by a third at mobile test and trace units. This came only weeks before the World Health Organisation classified Omicron as a variant of concern.

Even post-pandemic, Mitie’s record 2022 turnover was still boosted by nearly £48 million from ongoing Covid-related deals.

Key Issues

Detention profiteering: “Mitie Care and Custody”

The scale of Mitie’s immigration work makes the company one of the most significant profiteers from the UK border regime. Although it may not like to highlight its detention and deportation work, Mitie has been actively pursuing new contracts in this sector. The new deportation “escorting” contract doubled revenues in the area, and it continues to scoop up new detention centre contracts as they come up for re-tendering. Yet, the company is so vast that this segment still only represents about 3% of Mitie’s total revenue.

Nevertheless, revenue for this work has grown by 25% over the past year due to new or renewed immigration contracts. As of November 2022, Mitie runs the following immigration detention centres:

• Dungavel: a former Scottish prison which was converted into a detention centre in 2001. It has a capacity of 125 people and has been run by Mitie since 2021. According to the company’s latest annual report, the £66m contract runs for 8 years.

• Harmondsworth and Colnbrook: rebranded as ‘Heathrow Immigration Removal Centre’, now a single migrant mega-prison. With a capacity of 965 people, Mitie doesn’t like to call this a prison and instead describes it as the “largest immigration removal centre in Europe”. Its contract, awarded in 2014, has been extended to November 2023. It may extend still further to a maximum of 11 years, for a total of £248.9m.

• Derwentside: Originally known as Hassockfield, Derwentside is an 84-bed women’s holding centre near Newcastle which opened in 2021. Mitie’s £16.6m contract began in June 2021 and lasts until June 2023.

Campsfield detention centre in Oxford, also formerly run by Mitie, closed in 2018. However, the government recently announced its intention to reopen the site in late 2023 at the earliest. Whether Mitie will snap up the contract again remains to be seen.

In May 2018, the company won a £514m “escorting” contract, which runs until 2028. Its job is to supply guards to enforce each deportation from the UK and move migrants between detention centres and prisons. The work also includes the management of short-term holding rooms at ports, airports and immigration reporting centres; as well as contracts at short-term Home Office managed residential holding facilities such as Manston in Kent and Larne House in Northern Ireland.

Mitie security guards at Manston

Mitie also supplies custody officers to a number of police stations in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, and while it does not currently run any regular prisons, it does provide “facilities management”, such as cleaning and catering. The company​​​ says these contracts involve working closely with the Home Office, “to help deal with the challenges in immigration services, including the ramp-up of services to deal with the increasing volume of small boat arrivals on the South Coast.”

As well as profiting from immigration services, the Care and Custody division has been milking the police custody cash cow further. In 2022 alone, it secured one contract of over £57 million for healthcare provision to South West police and another up to £7 million for “healthcare and forensic services within custody” with Derbyshire police.

Mitie, along with Interserve, now has a potential stake in contracts worth £4 billion as part of the Prison Operator Service Framework. As a result, it added ‘justice’ to the Care and Custody package and hopes to secure a share of £2.5 billion “from a buoyant pipeline including prisons management, a key growth market in the Justice sector”.

Technology

Like other outsourcers, Mitie has a double incentive to increase automation of its services: to cut labour costs and to compete with rivals by offering new “high tech” services. And as Mitie’s security contracts increase everywhere – from hospitals to university campuses and from shopping malls to refugee camps – it’s also carving out a chilling name for itself in surveillance technology.

In 2021, it bought Esoteric a “niche provider of leading counter espionage and specialist surveillance countermeasure services”. As a result, Mitie now owns:

The only UK company to be accredited by the National Security Inspectorate for both electronic sweeping and covert investigations… The acquisition builds on Mitie’s existing capabilities as the UK’s leading provider of technology and intelligence-led security services.

Alongside Esoteric, buying up Interserve has enabled Mitie to secure even more ‘intelligence-led’ contracts for Mitie Security, including “AI CCTV and facial recognition”. In 2021, the company also “introduced an industry-first Data-Sharing Agreement” allegedly to allow “retailers to share data on shoplifters, helping to tackle prolific offenders and organised crime groups more effectively”. Mitie’s huge investment in this area of technology alongside its presence in nearly every public space we enter, becomes more concerning by the day.

In June 2022, Big Brother Watch filed a legal complaint with the Information Commissioner after it emerged that 35 Southern Co-ops were using facial recognition in their supermarkets. This “Orwellian in the extreme” technology was provided by “surveillance firm Facewatch”. It is no surprise perhaps that Mitie has previously worked with Facewatch to develop CCTV for security in retail spaces. As a Big Brother Watch report on facial recognition highlights, although increasing surveillance from facial recognition threatens everyone’s civil liberties, it also discriminates against people of colour and women disproportionately. Facial recognition cameras in supermarkets may be just the tip of the iceberg since Mitie’s most recent annual report acknowledges the introduction of “cutting edge technology” – including facial recognition – for “existing and prospective customers”.

Another high-profile development has been the use of cleaning robots. Mitie has publicised the use of these in big contracts including Birmingham Airport,  Heathrow Airport and Hinchingbrooke Hospital. It introduced “autonomous scrubber-dryer robots” along with an electronic meal ordering system to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. Elsewhere, Mitie has a partnership with Microsoft to work on using “Big Data” technologies in its facilities management and property services packages.

In 2019, CEO Phil Bentley acknowledged that the company’s “restructuring” and increased use of IT would “inevitably” impact some jobs. He continued:

That’s the reality. But that’s not the main story.

Does it mean fewer jobs or does it mean we are more productive and win more business? I’d like to think the latter.

“Moptimus Prime” cleaning robot at Hinchingbrooke hospital

In more detail

History

Mitie stands for the truly awful phrase: “Management Incentive Through Investment Equity”. It was started in 1987 in Bristol by two businessmen called David Telling and Ian Stewart. Its original business model was to buy 51% stakes to fund a range of companies, with the rest of the shares owned by the managers. Cleaning and “support services” were a focus, but Mitie has always had a loose range of business interests – basically, anything that looked like it could bring in a few quid.

Mitie’s detention “Care and Custody” business in fact started out as a car park company called Mitie Parking Services. But when a new director called Colin Sobell was appointed in 2009, the subsidiary changed its name and started chasing prison contracts. Sobell had previously run US prison company GEO’s UK operation, and before that worked for the detention company GSL (now part of G4S). Using his expertise and contacts, Mitie took the Campsfield detention contract over from GEO in 2011. Then in 2014, it won the Heathrow detention centres deal from Serco, suddenly becoming the UK’s biggest detention contractor. It’s been increasing and profiting from, detention contracts ever since.

This seemed easy enough in the pre-recession boom years when the rival outsourcing companies were all snapping up government services and busily expanding. Back in 2011, 37% of Mitie’s sales came from the public sector – another 34% from “energy services” sub-contracted from the big energy firms.

The wheels started to come off in 2015. Mitie got seriously stung by its ill-advised investment in the home care ‘market’. Mitie bought the Mihomecare business, previously called Enara, for £111 million in 2012, hoping to cash in on the ageing population. But in 2017 it sold it to a private equity buyer for a nominal £2, also handing over £9.45m to cover its losses. The business had depended on effectively paying care workers below the official minimum wage; now not only was the minimum wage rising, but Mitie was forced to actually pay it after workers campaigned and brought lawsuits. Mitie wasn’t able to pass on these rising costs to austerity-hit local authorities. Although the company now likes to emphasise that it has worked with the Living Wage Foundation since 2019, this wasn’t the case at that time.

Mitie people

Bosses

CEO Phil Bentley, a trained accountant from Bradford, was formerly Managing Director of British Gas (2007-13). He became well known to the media for giving frequent interviews where he was attacked for putting up household energy bills. He then left to become CEO of Miami-based telecoms firm Cable and Wireless. Bentley’s base salary is £900,000. But when you count his bonuses and pension allowance, he took home a hefty pay package of £3.8m in 2022. In fact, his profits have continued to rise, in 2021 he earned  £2.7m in 2021, up from £2m in 2021 following a £1.1m cash bonus and a £622,000 award from shares. Mitie’s latest annual report reveals that Bentley also owns stock shares valued at £1,800,000. However, a corporate data shows that the market value of his shares is £8.9 million.

Mitie’s links with the Conservative party are well known. Bentley’s predecessor was Tory peer, Baroness (Ruby) McGregor-Smith, CBE, who led the company for 10 years. MacGregor-Smith, an accountant, was recruited as finance director in 2002 and then made CEO in 2007. The first Asian woman to run a FTSE 250 company, she was later made a Conservative Baroness, and nicknamed the “prickly peer” by the Financial Times. Claiming to have a “passion” for outsourcing, she set out to grow the company with acquisitions and new contracts until it could rival the likes of Capita and her old employer Serco. McGregor-Smith was awarded her peerage in 2015 and left Mitie a year later. She now sits on the House of Lords Industry and Regulators Committee and was until recently President of the British Chamber of Commerce and a non-executive board member of the Department for Education.

Philippa Roe – aka Baroness Couttie – was another Tory Peer sitting at the top of the Mitie ladder; she passed away as we were writing this article. A non-executive director, Roe started her career in PR before moving into banking, where she enjoyed directorships at Schroders and Citigroup. From there she found her way into politics, serving as leader of Westminster City Council for five years as well as sitting on the London Crime Reduction Board. Both Roe and McGregor-Smith had unsuccessfully nominated themselves Tory candidates in the London mayoral elections.

Simon Venn is the company’s Chief Government & Strategy Officer and therefore presumably responsible for maintaining good relations with the state. Venn was described in a (now edited) page on Mitie’s website as “a senior advisor to the UK government”, who “was appointed in 2010 by the then Foreign Secretary, Sir William Hague MP, to sit on the Foreign & Commonwealth Office’s Overseas Business Risk (OBR) board”. Despite these apparently prominent roles, there is little publicly-available information on him. Like Bentley, he too served on the upper echelons of Cable & Wireless before that company got sold off.

Danny Spencer, has sat at the head of Mitie’s “Care and Custody” division for the past seven years. He is a former governor at HMP/YOI Littlehey in Cambridgeshire, and ex-Deputy Governor at HMP Liverpool.

Although the company looks set to achieve the dubious ‘Amazon of FM’ accolade, Mitie would likely prefer not to be reminded about Alloni’s tenure. He left Mitie with immediate effect in April 2022 following a “confidential plea bargain with the U.S. Department of Justice”. Although the investigation is ongoing, it relates to a leak of confidential documents alleging that between 2011 to 2019, telecoms giant Ericsson continued and extended its work in Iraq by paying bribes to the Islamic State and engaged in widespread corruption in ten countries. After the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) shared the leaked documents, Ericsson acknowledged “‘corruption-related misconduct’ in Iraq and possible payments to Isis”. Alloni was president of Ericsson’s North Africa division from 2010 and then a chief operating officer in charge of “all Ericsson’s operations in [the] Middle East” until 2013.

Shareholders

Corporate databases show that (at the time of writing), Mitie’s largest single shareholder is Silchester International Investors LLP owning 12.8%. The Silchester investment group, an international equity fund based in Mayfair, is ultimately controlled and owned by Stephen and Caroline Butt. Silchester International Investors LLP, dubbed the “quiet investors” has a diverse investment profile which, until recently, included Morrisons supermarket. In 2021, as the largest shareholder, 17 Silchester partners cashed in almost £111 million in dividends after the supermarket’s record sales during Covid-19.

According to its 2022 accounts, Silchester Partners Ltd reported a 16.7% jump in profits and a turnover of £128.6 million.  That year alone the Butt couple were paid a dividend of at least £69 million from the Silchester group. It’s no surprise that Stephen Butt – a former Morgan Stanley director – is now one of the UK’s richest fund managers according to The Sunday Times. Dabbling in philanthropy, the Butts are very giving: together donating a total of £52,000 to the Conservative Party between 2015 and 2021, with Caroline Butt alone donating £32,000. The rest of Silchester is owned by British and international backers, and the fund is known for making long-term investments in companies.

Next up is major global institutional investor Fidelity, which owns 10.7% of shares via Fidelity International Ltd and another 5.3% through FMR. Headquartered in Bermuda, a corporate paradise with no corporate tax, Fidelity is no doubt maxing out on its dividends from Mitie’s shady dealings. Ultimately run and owned by Abigail Johnson, the granddaughter of Fidelity’s founder, Johnson has a net worth of around $20 billion (£17 billion) and is listed by Forbes as the 72nd richest person in the world.

Like other PLCs, Mitie is mainly owned by international institutional investment funds. In 2018, when this profile was first published, shareholders were jumping ship as Mitie was in financial trouble. Around this time Fidelity reduced its stake from 9% in 2017. But Silchester was busy adding to its shares, spotting a lucrative opportunity – and it was proved right. At the time, Silchester already had a bigger stake than is usual for a single shareholder to have in outsourcing companies like Mitie.

In 2022, Mitie shared its record turnover with shareholders. Despite a dividend break in 2021, in the tax year ending in March 2022, shareholders secured dividend payments of £5.7 million. Meanwhile, Mitie’s directors discussed a further £19.5 million dividend payment in their AGM in June to keep shareholders sweet. The next company target is a 30-40% dividend payout for shareholders, up from 20% in 2022.

Finances

Outlook and strategies

Mitie currently earns nearly half its turnover through lucrative government contracts. These now total over £2.3 billion compared with over £1.7 billion from non-government contracts.

After its home care losses (see below), Mitie shifted its focus towards “core” Facilities Management (FM) business. Its model aimed to try and get companies to buy an “integrated” package of more services, and for longer contract periods.

So now, rather than just outsourcing particular jobs like cleaning, maintenance or security, Mitie advises companies on how it can take over running all their FM needs. It also brought in “new technology and analytics”.  The acquisition of Interserve in 2020 means Mitie is now one of the UK’s largest FM companies, since it retained 90% of the former Interserve contracts. In 2019, Carlo Alloni – ex-managing director of Mitie’s Technical Services division – openly stated Mitie’s intention to become the “Amazon of FM”. (See below for more detail on Alloni.)

In the latest annual report, Mitie boldly declared that since 2021, its new strategy is “focused on accelerating growth, enhancing margin and improving cash generation, underpinned by ‘capability enablers’”. What this actually means is huge executive bonuses and benefit packages alongside rising dividend payouts for shareholders.

For Mitie, climate catastrophe, ongoing wars and the spiralling cost of living crisis simply open new paths to profit. The Mitie leadership team openly admits that the government’s “decarbonisation agenda” and increased defence spending offer “good momentum” to “accelerate growth”. And, as the most recent financial accounts note:

Following the significant rise in gas and electricity costs, Technical Services is benefitting from increased activity in all areas of decarbonisation, including solar power, LED roll-outs, air source heat pump installation and electric vehicle charging projects.

Profit and growth:

Business is now booming. In 2022, Mitie’s record revenue of £4 billion created an operating profit of £167 million and a free cash flow of £133 million.

But prior to the pandemic, the company was on shaky ground. Until 2015, Mitie grew steadily, and in the previous five years made a constant overall operating profit margin of around 6%. Then trouble hit, and the company issued four profit warnings between March 2015 and January 2018. Although it reported profits in 2015/6, revenues were starting to fall, and it reported a loss in 2016/7. The company’s turnover shrunk from £2.4 billion in 2015 to £2.1 billion in 2017. Meanwhile, 2017/8 results showed that although turnover increased slightly to £2.2 billion, helped by new contracts, they actually made an overall loss in their accounts.

A number of official investigations were launched into aspects of Mitie’s previous financial reporting. Mitie’s 2017 accounts had to recalculate the figures it originally gave for 2016, recording its revenues and profits as lower. In 2016, the Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigated the timing of Mitie’s profit warning announcements. Another watchdog, the Financial Reporting Committee (FRC), opened an investigation into the “preparation and approval of the financial statements” for 2016 (now closed), and another into the auditing of Mitie’s 2015 and 2016 accounts by Deloitte.

Mitie Scandal Sheet

Mitie is not as high profile as its notorious rivals G4S and Serco. Most of its work has been in less controversial cleaning and maintenance, or for corporate clients. Though, this looks set to change as it pursues more profitable opportunities in detention and security.

(2022) Manston migrant camp hit the headlines after refugees – including children – were held for long periods in “terrible” and severely overcrowded conditions. Human rights campaigners and lawyers have now called for a public inquiry into the site following allegations from refugees about “systemic” abuse, violence and ill-treatment from staff. Complaints also flag “significant failures of planning and management” at the Home Office site.

(2022) The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) launched an investigation into Mitie for “suspected anticompetitive conduct” following the award of yet more lucrative immigration detention deals. In December 2022, the CMA “provisionally” closed this investigation.

(2022) Allegations that Mitie Care and Custody staff sent racist messages in a WhatsApp group chat led to a Home Office investigation. Comments reportedly targeted Syrian refugees, Chinese people, Dianne Abbot and Priti Patel.

(2021) The company made millions from Covid-19 contracts. At its Inverness testing site, a “catalogue of failures” by the company contributed to staff falling ill.

(2017) Financial investigations: The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) investigated the timing of Mitie’s profit warning announcements in 2016. Another watchdog, the Financial Reporting Committee (FRC), opened an investigation into the “preparation and approval of the financial statements” for 2016, and another into the auditing of Mitie’s 2015 and 2016 accounts by Deloitte.

(2017) Mitie exits home care: Mitie eventually sold its MiHomecare business at a loss – after paying £112 million for it in 2012. One reason for losses was that it had finally been forced to pay staff the minimum wage.

(2015) MiHomecare scandal: Mitie’s home care business was hit with investigations and lawsuits after failing to pay carers the minimum wage and cutting short care visits. At least four local authority customers had raised concerns about care standards, while the Care Quality Commission (CQC) had rated at least one Mihomecare as “inadequate”.

(2015) Hospital failing standards: within months of winning a cleaning and catering contract for Royal Cornwall Hospitals, Mitie’s pay was docked for repeatedly failing to meet standards.

(2015) Harmondsworth conditions exposed: secret filming inside the Mitie-run detention centre, as part of an investigation by Corporate Watch, showed the misery inside after Mitie took over, cut services and increased bang-up hours under its new contract.

(2011) Campsfield: hunger strikes, suicide, and fire. There are plenty of horror stories from Mitie’s management of the Oxfordshire detention centre; we told some in this 2014 report.

Campsfield after the 2013 fire

Company addresses:

HQ and general enquiries: The Shard, Level 12, 32 London Bridge Street, Southwark, London, SE1 9SG

Tel: 0330 678 0710 Email: info@mitie.com

Regional offices:

1st Floor, The Chocolate Factory, Somerdale, Keynsham, BS31 2GJ

35 Duchess Road, Rutherglen, Glasgow, G73 1AU

650 Pavilion Drive, Northampton Business Park, Brackmills, Northampton, NN4 7SL

NB: unless other sources are stated, information comes from the company’s annual reports and accounts. The latest information can be found here on its website.

This article was updated on 18 January 2023 to address concerns flagged by Mitie’s PR department and to reflect the fact that Mitie is responsible for the management of security at Manston detention camp, not the whole site.

See also: 2015 profile from The Bristol Cable

The post Mitie detention profiteers: 2023 company profile appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We ask: who is profiting from supplying our energy? How much are the bosses getting paid? And how have these companies been cosying up to government?

We hope that our research can be a useful resource for those organising towards a mass non-payment of energy bills.

We have released our alternative company profiles of the Big Six energy suppliers in reverse order over the last few weeks; E.ON, OVO, Octopus Energy, EDF and Scottish Power. Next up:

British Gas: the UK’s number one energy supplier

British gas is still capitalising on its image as a publicly owned energy provider of the past. However its motives these days are anything but for the public good. From mis-selling to customers to mistreating workers, rampant greenwashing and enforcing a poverty premium for customers by aggressively installing pre-pay meters; today British Gas only serves its shareholders and directors, as it makes obscene profits despite the cost of living crisis.

British Gas is the UK’s biggest energy supplier and is owned by Centrica Group plc. It supplies 28.2% of the UK’s gas and 20.2% of its electricity. The majority of British Gas’ supply is from renewables, nuclear, and natural gas.

Created in 1812 under the name The Gas Light and Coke Company to develop and maintain gas supply, it was the world’s first public utility firm. In 1986, almost two centuries later, the Thatcher government privatised British Gas under the Gas Act.

Centrica, the current parent company, was created in 1997. It does business outside the UK in Ireland, the United States and Norway. Part of the reason it has fared better than other energy firms in recent years is because of its diverse portfolio of subsidiaries, which buy and sell energy amongst suppliers, produce energy, or sell it directly to customers.

Centrica’s businesses include:

• British Gas Energy, which supplies energy to residential and small business customers in England, Scotland and Wales.
• Bord Gáis, which supplies energy to customers in Ireland.
• British Gas Services, which provides services to residential customers in England, Scotland and Wales.
• Centrica Business Solutions, which provides energy supply to larger business customers in England, Scotland and Wales, and ‘low-carbon energy solutions’ for business customers internationally.
• Energy Marketing & Trading, which is the trading arm of Centrica, and is also responsible for sourcing energy on behalf of the Group’s energy supply activities in the UK.
• Upstream, which includes Centrica’s oil and gas assets, its 20% interest in the UK’s nuclear power generation fleet and the Rough field, a gas storage facility in the North Sea.

HOW MANY UK ENERGY CUSTOMERS DOES BRITISH GAS HAVE?

Electricity (excluding pre-payment): 4.9 million

Gas (excluding pre-payment): 5.6 million

HOW MUCH IS IT MAKING?

Centrica is raking it in at the moment, after performing so poorly in 2020 that it had to stop paying dividends to its shareholders. Company profits for the six months ending in June 2022 rose to £1.34 billion from £262 million a year before. This means that Centrica’s half-year profits were five times higher than a year earlier. This is in the aftermath of a wave of energy companies going bust in 2021.

WHO OWNS IT?

In November 2022, 38.3% of Centrica was owned by institutional shareholders, with Schroder Investment Management Ltd holding the largest share at 9.49%. One of Schroder’s portfolio managers was accused of fraud in the United States in 2010. It was also fined in Hong Kong in 2016 for failing to properly disclose the stocks held by the company.

The usual suspects, such as multinational investment companies like the Vanguard Group and BlackRock as well as governments such as Norway and New Zealand also have shares in Centrica. BAE Systems – an arms company which supplies supplies dictatorships – also holds shares in Centrica, according to business information databases.

WHO RUNS IT?

Chris O’Shea is Centrica’s chief executive. He worked for Shell in Nigeria in the mid-2000s; the oil giant has a horrific legacy of repression in the country and has so far avoided calls for justice. For his role as Chief Executive at Centrica he received £875,000 in 2021.

Chief financial officer at Centrica is Kate Ringrose, who was paid just under £1 million in 2021. Despite the increasing poverty caused by rising energy prices, she also accepted a hefty bonus, although Chris O’Shea refused his. In fact, her bonus, pension and other benefits more than doubled what she would have been paid if she had accepted her salary alone.

Scott Wheway is the company chair and was paid £410,000 in 2021.

Ex-Home Secretary and former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Amber Rudd, was appointed to the board of directors in 2022 when she was no longer an MP. Nevertheless, her appointment is another example of the revolving door between the Conservative party and the boards of the UK’s top energy companies.

IS BRITISH GAS ENERGY SUFFERING AS A RESULT OF THE COST OF LIVING CRISIS?

Not at all. In fact, in June 2022, Centrica received so much criticism over how much money it was making that the company promised to donate 10% of its profits to vulnerable customers, and CEO Chris O’Shea agreed to forego his massive 2021 bonus. Yet it didn’t stop O’Shea from criticising a government windfall tax, which would likely be much higher than the 10% the company has voluntarily offered.

British Gas’ Charity PR stunt

Centrica’s charity arm, which is set to distribute this 10%, is the British Gas Energy Trust. Centrica claims the charity’s aim is to help tackle fuel poverty, but this is a corporate sleight of hand.

While people nationwide face massive bills and the UK’s biggest energy supplier makes excessive profits, Centrica’s charity aids those struggling most with handouts, normalising unaffordable energy bills and stigmatising those who can’t afford them. With Centrica starting to pay dividends to shareholders for the first time in three years, the company needed this PR move to pacify upset customers.

GREENWASH AND THE HYDROGEN LOBBY

Centrica has been using carbon offsetting as a way to market itself as “green” despite being a fossil fuel company. According to an openDemocracy investigation on British Gas:

Under one [carbon offsetting] scheme Centrica buys into, a firm has declared ownership of a chunk of the Amazon that actually belongs to an Indigenous tribe, and is demanding a ransom fee not to deforest it.

The openDemocracy investigation also found that almost half of the carbon offsets held by Centrica were in actual fact bought from a chemical factory in China that was accused of cheating the system.

Whilst claiming green credentials via a so-called “People and Planet Plan“, the company has used its profile and government access to quietly promote an anti-environmental agenda. In 2016, it was found to have donated tens of thousands of dollars to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) a US-based climate denial group with links to Donald Trump.

The company has used the rising cost of fuel to call for the scrapping of environmental policies such as the green levy (an environmental tax on energy bills to finance carbon-saving initiatives). Meanwhile, Centrica – which has also been an investor in the UK fracking industry – has even used the energy crisis to suggest that the government reopen the debate on fracking, which is currently subject to a moratorium.

Like many companies in the UK gas industry, Centrica has been advocating for the adoption of “hydrogen-ready” boilers, claiming this technology will “help us to reach net zero together”. It was part of the “Hydrogen Zone”, a large display at the 2022 Labour Party Conference which promoted the fuel. According to campaigners, hydrogen-ready boilers would still largely run on natural gas, and simply don’t compare to solar or wind power in terms of energy efficiency or sustainability. However, the hydrogen option would be far more profitable for Centrica, as it would rely on the continued use of gas industry infrastructure. It seems that lobbying is having an effect; the government is now considering requiring that all boilers be “hydrogen ready” from 2026.

CONSUMER RIGHTS

According to the company’s latest annual report, Centrica received nearly 2000 more complaints from customers in 2021 than the previous year. Back in 2011, British Gas was handed a £2.5 million fine by energy regulator Ofgem for not dealing with complaints properly, and one has to wonder whether its record in that department has improved since then. A survey by the GMB Union in 2021 showed that 95% of British Gas’ workers thought that the company was mis-selling to customers, something for which it has also been fined.

In early 2022, British Gas failed to fix customers’ boilers for months in the dead of winter – leaving thousands cold and without hot water.

Pre-pay meters: The poverty premium and vulnerable customers

According to a freedom of information request lodged by the Telegraph newspaper, British Gas has been granted more than 186,000 warrants in the last five years to replace customers’ energy meters with prepayment alternatives. This means 2.6% of its 7 million customers were forced to have pre-pay meters, almost triple the industry average of 0.9%. Smart meters can also be changed to pre-payment meters remotely to circumvent the need for a warrant, which energy providers did 100,000 times to UK households in 2021.

Pre-payment meters can turn electricity and/or gas off once the money has run out, leaving vulnerable people (such as the elderly, or individuals dependent on electricity to charge a ventilator or wheelchair) in a potentially dangerous situation. They are also more expensive than paying standard energy bills, plunging people deeper into fuel poverty.

MPs have singled out British Gas as having a “heavy-handed approach” due to the sheer volume of warrants the company has obtained. A recent Ofgem report named British Gas as one of the 17 energy suppliers that need to do far more to support vulnerable customers.

DOES THE COMPANY HAVE CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS WITH THE GOVERNMENT?

According to Transparency International, Centrica has met with UK prime ministers on 14 separate occasions since 2012. In that same period, company representatives also attended at least 234 meetings with government ministers.

A 2016 investigation by Unearthed shows that Centrica employed three people with links to the Conservative Party in its communications team. According to the report:

Benedict McAleenan, the company’s public affairs manager, was formerly Tory campaigns manager from October 2006 to September 2010. Head of public affairs for Centrica, William Heald, interned for William Hague in 2008.

Before becoming the company’s director of public affairs in September 2014, Sarah Richardson was a Conservative Party election candidate for the European Parliament in 2004 and 2009, and ran to be an MP in 2005. She was also a long-time Conservative Westminster councillor.

The report also highlighted how one of Amber Rudd’s key 2015 speeches on the phasing out of coal – in favour of gas and nuclear – bore a suspicious resemblance to a Centrica document published the previous year.

COMPANY ADDRESSES

Centrica plc registered office: Millstream, Maidenhead Road, Windsor SL4 5GD, UK

British Gas: Millstream Maidenhead Road, Windsor, Berkshire, SL4 5GD

The post Heat the Rich? Part six: British Gas/Centrica appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We ask: who is profiting from supplying our energy? How much are the bosses getting paid? and how have these companies been cosying up to government?

We hope that our research can be a useful resource for those organising towards a mass non-payment of energy bills.

We will be releasing our alternative company profiles of the Big Six energy suppliers in reverse order over the coming weeks. You can see our profiles on Scottish Power, EDF, Octopus Energy and Ovo Energy here. Next up?

E.ON: the UK’s 2nd largest supplier

E.ON is the second biggest energy supplier in the UK, currently controlling 16% of the energy supply market. E.ON mainly focuses on distribution and supply, as well as nuclear and renewable energy (clean in Europe, but with a 50% stake in a coal power station in Turkey).

A German-based energy utility company operating worldwide with 50 million customers, E.ON is one of the biggest energy suppliers in Europe. We’ve featured E.ON before as the company made it onto the nuclear list in our ‘Wreckers of the Earth’ directory, as one of the top 300 companies with London offices profiteering from wrecking our planet.

But where would we be without Michael Lewis, E.ON’s UK CEO a supposed “environmental expert”, who took it upon himself to speak out on behalf of the UK public in spring, criticising the government’s inaction over energy bills. He proposed interventions like insulation and home upgrades to help the 40% of UK households likely to fall into fuel poverty this year because they can’t afford ever-rising energy bills. Unsurprisingly, Lewis’ critique didn’t quite cover curbing energy companies’ prices or introducing a windfall tax. And of course, on his seven-digit salary, it’s not likely that Lewis will really understand the impact of fuel poverty first-hand this winter.

Like most corporations these days E.ON boasts about its sustainability credentials. Whether it be lobbying against the ‘existential’ threat from the Don’t Pay campaign, 72% hikes in annual salary for E.ON management members, or dubious tariffs for the elderly costing an extra £245. In this profile, we show that E.ON is very good at promoting sustainability, but only it’s own. It’s a different story when it comes to its customers.

How many UK energy customers does E.ON have?

Electricity (excluding pre-payment): 4.6 million

Gas (excluding pre-payment): 3.1 million

Who runs it?

Lewis calls the shots for in the UK, he has been CEO of E.ON in the UK since 2017. Starting as an environmental consultant in E.ON (known then as Powergen) in 1993, Lewis has had a long career at E.ON. In 2002, he was vice president of corporate development at E.ON’s Headquarters in Germany, climbing up the E.ON ladder to become the European managing director for Climate and Renewables in 2007. Now on a salary of over £1 million a year, Lewis won’t be hurt by the current cost of living crisis. When he’s not at E.ON, Lewis is on the government’s National Environment Research Council board, making decisions about who receives public money for research into environmental science in the UK.

Lewis’ boss, Leonhard Birnbaum the CEO of E.ON SE since April 2021, boasted a pay package of €5.2 million (£4.5 million) in 2021. His salary is ‘capped’ at a mere €7.6 million (£6.5 million). Birnbaum has an expansive international network. He holds other positions including as the vice chair for the UK-based World Energy Council, “the world’s principal and impartial network of energy leaders” alongside former Shell and PWC directors, as Vice-President of the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) and as the Vice-President of Eurelectric, the European Electricity Association alongside the outgoing head of the EDF (UK’s 4th biggest supplier), Jean-Bernard Lévy. Birnbaum previously clocked up 12 years at management consultancy McKinsey, before switching to RWE in 2008 (E.ON’s biggest single shareholder), leaving to join E.ON management in 2013.

Unsurprisingly, while our bills go up, management’s salaries do too, Thomas König, the Chief Operating Officer had a 72% increase in pay between 2021 and 2020. Alongside Birnbaum and König, there are three other officers on E.ON SA’s top management board. Discounting Birnbaum, together the officers took home a total salary of €8.7 million (£7.5 million) in 2021. But it’s not just the management board cashing in on the cost of living crisis: E.ON’s supervisory board, which is made up of 20 members, received compensation totalling €4.3 million (£3.7 million) in 2021.

Who owns it?

The ultimate parent company in the UK: E.ON Holdings Ltd, is owned by German-based company E.ON Se according to Companies House. In turn E.ON Se is owned by multiple shareholders.

RWE AG is the biggest single shareholder holding 15% of shares after making one of the biggest transactions in German history. Notorious as one of Europe’s top CO2 emitters, and another Wrecker of the Earth, RWE is responsible for the largest quantity of CO2 emissions in the UK. Backed by BlackRock, RWE took over E.ON’s renewable activities in 2018.

But greenwashing will not erase RWE’s past, the company is renowned in Germany (and further afield) for deforestation. In the 1970s RWE brought the ancient Hambacher Forest to mine coal destroying over 90% of 5,000 hectares of forest. Between 2008 and 2013, Birnbaum, the current CEO of E.ON SE, sat on the management board responsible for this destruction. In 2014 eco-defenders fought back against RWE, occupying the forest. Campaigners built tree houses starting the movement “Hambi bleibt” (Hambi Stays). But in 2018, RWE CEO Rolf Martin Schmit insisted “there’s no possibility of leaving the forest standing”, as police carried out RWE’s work in destroying peoples’ homes.

Other profiteers pocketing E.ON customers’ increased profits include Capital Group Companies Inc, one of the world’s oldest investment management companies, owning 10.16% of shares. Closely followed by the Government of Canada with 8.14% shares.

Is E.ON suffering as a result of the cost of living crisis?

Doesn’t seem so, in fact, quite the opposite. The ultimate parent company E.ON SE reported a 17% annual increase in revenue in 2021 to £75.3 billion. And profits weren’t so bad either, up over £3.4 billion from 2020 to £4.5 billion in 2021.

Where’s the profit going?

As households struggle to meet the surge in bills E.ON SE paid out a record €1.3 billion (£1.1 billion) in dividends in 2021. Company shareholders will likely be saying ‘cost of living crisis? What crisis?’, as E.ON’s customers foot the bill for these increased payouts.

E.ON’s success isn’t limited to the parent company. Whilst customers feel the pinch, E.ON PLC reported profits of £417 million in 2021 up £78 million from 2020. Topped up by the government, via the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme, E.ON received £27 million in the last two years, £26 million alone in 2020.

E.ON’s latest UK Scandals

Despite offering a self-proclaimed “no” to corruption and illegal activity, E.ON has had its fair share of scandals. In 2014, the company was fined and forced to payout at least £20 million to its customers after energy regulator Ofgem found that E.ON misled and mis-sold tariffs on a mass scale between 2010 and 2013.

E.ON didn’t learn after it got caught in 2014. Just two years later in 2016, E.ON was exposed, yet again, this time for exploiting vulnerable customers out of £37 million. In 2016, E.ON in collaboration with AgeUK, a charity aiming to support older people, offered a special rate for gas and electricity for the elderly. AgeUK encouraged people to switch to E.ON, earning £41 for each person who signed up for the tariff. Then, in February 2016, it was revealed that the 152,000 customers on this ‘special‘tariff were paying £245 more than people on other E.ON tariffs. It turns out that E.ON and Age UK had a ‘special relationship’ that led to an investigation by the Charity Commission and Ofgem.

And it doesn’t stop there. E.ON was recently forced to apologise after sending ‘free’ socks to 30,000 customers urging them to keep the “heating down, CO2 down”. The socks were emblazoned with a heartwarming image of sunshine hugging the earth. Customers pointed out the irony of such a shallow and costly gesture:

So with energy bills about to rocket, @eon_next @eonenergyuk thinks the best thing to do is to send customers (my mother in this case) a pair of socks…..
Just think of the cost both £££ and environmentally of this stunt 🤦🏻‍♀️ pic.twitter.com/TG11vB8G5x

— niffy (@niffy81176820) January 12, 2022

@EON_SE_en @MartinSLewis @BBCTheOneShow @theJeremyVine @gompertz my elderly auntie on income support just received this pitiful package from her energy company!! A packet of polyester socks. Are they 4 real?? As if suggesting cuddling ur pets wasn’t bad enough? Shame on u E-On pic.twitter.com/lx8MYvrXuy

— Sarah Collins (@Sc0lly) January 12, 2022

E.ON’s Political donations in the UK

Between 2003-2007, when the Labour Party was still in power, E.ON (including subsidiary Powergen) donated a total of £18,000 to the party. In 2016 E.ON donated £8,400 to the Conservative Party.

Does E.ON have close relationships with the Government?

Over the last decade, E.ON has had at least 90 meetings (nearly 50% took place in the last two years) with ministers and the PM. E.ON participated in business group meetings with former prime ministers David Cameron and Theresa May about European business in 2013 and Brexit in 2018. More recently, E.ON has had private meetings about the energy retail crisis and energy efficiency with Kwasi Kwarteng, amongst others. The company has also participated in at least 13 group meetings along with the rest of the Big Six energy suppliers over the last year.

In 2021 E.ON, alongside EDF and petrochemical company INEOS, held a stall at the Conservative party conference. Featured in the conference brochure, E.ON claimed to Conservative readers that it was committed to “making energy cleaner”, but tellingly there was no commitment to making it affordable.

In fact, an OpenDemocracy investigation revealed that E.ON has been actively lobbying the government against the “punitive” energy price cap complaining it’s an “unattractive time to be an energy supplier”. E.ON also voiced concerns over the Don’t Pay campaign predicting potential losses of £45 million. In turn, E.ON’s data analysis was shared with the Treasury and CEO Lewis pencilled a letter directly to Kwasi Kwarteng when he was Minister of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and Nadhim Zahawi, the Chancellor at the time.

Company addresses

UK Headquarters: Westwood Way, Westwood Business Park, Coventry, CV4 8LG

Ultimate parent company: E.ON Societas Europaea, 1 Brusseler Platz, 45131 Essen, Germany

The post Heat the Rich? Part five: E.ON appeared first on Corporate Watch.

We ask: who is profiting from supplying our energy? How much are the bosses getting paid? and how have these companies been cosying up to government?

We hope that our research can be a useful resource for those organising towards a mass non-payment of energy bills.

We will be releasing our alternative company profiles of the Big Six energy suppliers in reverse order over the coming weeks. You can see our profiles on Scottish Power, EDF and Octopus Energy here. Next up?

OVO Energy; the UK’s 3rd largest supplier

Bristol-based OVO is the third biggest UK energy supplier. The company is majority owned by its billionaire founder, and major Tory donor Stephen Fitzpatrick – who has the dubious honour of being dubbed ‘Britain’s Elon Musk’. 

The company sparked anger earlier this year when customers of OVO-owned SSE Energy Services were sent an email recommending that they cuddle pets and eat porridge to save on heating bills.

OVO seem to be taking the threat of an energy bill strike seriously, with Fitzpatrick taking the time to complain to the Daily Mail that the call for collective action on energy bills isn’t “the British way”. 

What is it?

OVO Energy supplies electricity and gas to customers in the UK through its SSE branded division, and Boost, for its prepayment customers. Corgi HomePlan – owned by OVO Finance, provides boiler cover. OVO purchased Spark Energy in 2018, which specialises in supplying energy to landlords and letting agencies. Group subsidiary Kaluza provides software platforms for utilities. 

However, OVO’s income comes overwhelmingly from gas and electricity supply, accounting for a massive £4.2 billion of its £4.5 billion revenue in 2021.

OVO sponsors the OVO Hydro in Glasgow, Scotland’s largest entertainment venue.

Where is it active?

OVO Energy has 3.12 million domestic electricity customers and 2.24 million domestic gas customers.

2019 figures, the latest available, show that OVO’s Boost prepayment business had over 350,000 households on its books.

OVO Group also has subsidiaries in several other countries, including a domestic supply company in Spain. However, revenue generated outside the UK came to only £20 million in 2021, out of a total of £4.5 billion.

Who owns it?

Privately owned, OVO’s founder and ultimate owner is Stephen Fitzpatrick, who owns 68% of OVO Energy’s parent company, OVO Group Limited, via his holding company Imagination Industries Ltd. Mitsubishi Corporation owns 21% and Mayfair Olympic Holdco Limited owns 11%.

Fitzpatrick is also CEO of a ‘vertical aircraft’ business – marketing ‘flying electric taxis’ – with his stake valued at around $1 billion last year. The company is US-listed and based in the Cayman Islands, a tax haven.

The billionaire launched a cynical PR offensive at the start of September,  outlining a ten-point action plan for the energy crisis. Fitzpatrick’s suggestions made it look like he was on the side of the poor, but his company profits are the real bottom line, as the government bailout measures later announced by Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng will – as well as putting a temporary cap on what consumers can be charged for energy – ensure the profits of private companies like OVO by guaranteeing that the state will cover any shortfall faced by companies.

Dodgy Finances

OVO Group’s accounting is creative, to say the least, which isn’t surprising for a company whose founder is a CEO of a business in the Cayman Islands. For example, OVO has come under criticism for the high fees it pays for ‘branding rights’ to Fitzpatrick’s holding company Imagination Industries Ltd. – £21 million last year. 

Fitzpatrick has previously been quizzed by MPs over inter-company loans – including a £5.6 million loan from his holding company Imagination Industries, OVO’s parent company, to his ‘flying taxi’ company Vertical Aerospace, with a massive interest rate of 30%. 

Similarly, questions have also been asked about loans within the group. OVO Group received £7 million in interest from Group companies in 2021 and provided £17 million of loans to OVO Holdings Ltd, an intermediary between the parent and its subsidiary OVO Energy. Interest on the loans is paid at 7% or higher.

Finally, The OVO Group has made £1.5 million in tax-deductible donations to the ‘Ovo Charitable Foundation’.

A broke, sad woman feeling cold at home and working with her laptop by candlelight in order to save money on utility bills

What other criticisms have been made of the company?

OVO was told to pay £8.9 million to customers in 2020 after overcharging. Inaccurate statements had been sent to more than half a million customers. Then last year the company was told to pay £2.8 million in compensation after failing to safeguard customers’ tariff prices when they switched energy suppliers.

OVO also received criticism for wrongly claiming that a customer owed £44,000 after the company had made an error reading her meter.

How much is it making?

The company reported a pre-tax profit of £370 million in 2021 (compared to a £176 million loss the previous year) however, this was largely due to a £372 million revaluation of energy derivative contracts. The underlying business made a £2 million loss, compared to a £66 million loss in 2020. It cut 1,700 jobs in January, in addition to 2,600 already lost in 2020. However, the company recently hired 500 workers in the face of a sharp rise in calls from customers. It received £17 million in furlough payments in 2020.

The company has £2.3 billion in assets. As of 31 December 2021, OVO had £300,000 of loans outstanding to directors, 

Bailed out by the state

Recently published accounts suggested that until the government announced support for energy bills, the company had been concerned that it would breach financial requirements this year, putting the company’s future in doubt. It blamed households being unable to pay their bills, leading to an increase in “bad debt” as a factor. However, when the accounts were released publicly at the end of September the company said it did not expect to breach any covenants in the next 12 months, adding that the auditors had raised concerns in June over the impact of “market uncertainties” but government and regulatory action had created “more certainty”.

Who runs it?

CEO and owner Stephen Fitzpatrick donated £185,000 to the Conservative Party in the first quarter of 2019, making him one of the largest donors in the period running up to Boris Johnson’s re-election that December, at a time when Labour’s policy was to nationalise energy. Most of the donation was paid via his company Imagination Industries Incubator, whose parent Imagination Industries Ltd. receives payments for branding rights from OVO.

OVO Group’s highest-paid director in 2021 received £558,000.

The CEO of OVO’s Retail arm, Raman Bhatia, was previously the Head of Digital Bank for HSBC Retail Banking and Wealth Management in the UK and Europe, serving on the Executive Committee where he led on risk management. HSBC has been fined billions for a variety of breaches including money laundering regulations. Earlier in his career, he worked as a management consultant at Bain, an investment firm that has been accused of ‘vampire capitalism’ for its asset-stripping activities. Bhatia has previously spoken at a panel at the Conservative Party conference.

Stephen Murphy, Chairman of the OVO Group board, was previously CEO of the Virgin Group from 2005 to 2011.

Last year OVO Energy’s highest-paid director, then believed to be Adrian Letts, whose tenure as Chief Executive ended early this year, received £644,000 including pension contributions. In the previous year, the highest-paid director received £327,000. 

In total OVO’s directors were paid over £2.4 million in 2021, taking into account pensions and other payments this totalled over £3 million.

Does OVO have a close relationship with government?

According to Transparency International, OVO has taken part in 38 meetings with UK government ministers since 2012. A great many of these meetings were with Kwasi Kwarteng, who – during his brief stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer in Autumn 2022 – worked on the Tory energy bailout package. OVO had a private meeting with Kwarteng to discuss energy retail issues in June 2022. 

Jonson Cox, a director at OVO Finance, OVO’s immediate parent company, chaired UK water regulator Ofwat from 2012-2020. Previously he had held senior positions at two water companies.

Address:

HQ: 1 Rivergate, Temple Quay Bristol, BS1 6ED

The post Heat the Rich? Part four: OVO appeared first on Corporate Watch.

High Speed Two (HS2) is a 343-mile, high-speed cross-country railway line. HS2 would pick up from HS1, which connects the Channel Tunnel to London, snaking to Leeds & Manchester via Birmingham. Plans for the project have been in the pipeline since 2009, and the final stages are not expected to be completed until 2040.

The initial budget for the work was £33 billion, but the expected cost has since spiralled to over £100 billion. The project is being overseen by High Speed Two Ltd, a state-owned company.

At the 2022 Earth First! gathering, Corporate Watch spoke to Liz and Nancy, two activists who’ve been challenging HS2 for several years; from living in camps on route, to taking direct action in tunnels and structures. We spoke to them about how this eco-defence movement stood up to corporate power and the impact of increasingly draconian government legislation on environmental protest.

“HS2 encompasses so many injustices”

Liz explained that the proposed route “goes through 108 Ancient woodlands, which are going to be decimated by the project. And it’s going to create – instead of a green corridor – a cement corridor all the way up the country… It’s splitting the country in half with this huge slab of concrete”.

“HS2 encompasses so many injustices,’ Nancy said ‘wherever you sit on the political spectrum or whatever issues you really care about”. 

Whether it’s ecological issues, or the social issues of people being displaced from their homes, and then being treated completely unfairly by the compulsory purchase scheme. And whether it’s the economic factors of building HS2 or, the way that governments are mandating these kinds of things and calling it ‘the political will of the people’.

Nancy and Liz said that in the early stages, local communities along the proposed route set up “really strong groups” to oppose HS2. But the government approved plans in 2017:

I think a lot of those people felt very disenfranchised. And about three and a half years ago the direct action campaign started with one woman called Sarah Green. She was at Greenham Common, and lives in Hillingdon, which is one of the first areas where they started building. It’s just outside of London in the Colne Valley, which is a really beautiful area. She had a business showing people around the canals – HS2 completely decimated that business, made it completely unviable, because people had come to see a beautiful area. And now all they were seeing was HS2.

So she started the direct action campaign by climbing under a digger and staying under there for, I think, a couple of days and then people started setting up roadside camps.

“Obstructing the destruction”

Shortly after this, activists “started setting up woodland camps” along the proposed route as opposition against HS2 grew in solidarity with local communities. In the summer of 2020, when the pandemic hit, resistance expanded further. Liz explained that lockdown:

Created a moment where a lot of people were suddenly either furloughed or not going to uni. There were no employment prospects – it created a space for people to go and try something new. That’s when I went to the camps. At that point, there were about seven camps along the line, all set up at different points that were strategically important to HS2, mainly because it was on the land that [the company] wanted, or that they needed to build the train line. 

That’s not a new tactic, protest camps have been going for quite a while. They have to send people in to remove people from the site, which isn’t so easy when there are activists 60 foot up in the trees, or underground in tunnels. So that was a big tactic – to occupy land – but the camps also created a space we could do outreach to involve the local community and sort of reinvigorate those groups creating a base from which people can do direct action, obstructing the destruction.

Digging for victory

Liz feels that by 2021 the “campaign felt really strong” with camps along the London to Birmingham route. The year started with the eviction of a tunnel system under Euston Square Gardens. Liz explained that the gardens “right outside the HS2 head office were one of the only green spaces in that area, sitting on one of the most polluted roads in London”. It was also one of the few places homeless people in the area found to sleep. The gardens were due for destruction initially to make way for a “temporary taxi rank” but activists found out that, “a luxury hotel” to serve wealthy HS2 customers was eventually due for construction on the site. They continued:

It was an important space. So they [activists] decided to dig the first HS2 tunnel. The activists lasted in there for 31 days. It was an amazing event and it certainly inspired me. I saw that you can take big, powerful action against government and HS2 and be very disruptive. It was the start of a set of tunnel protests. There were quite a few major evictions in a row after this. I think each eviction costs around three or four million pounds. So it was quite successful, I think, as a protest.

Liz told Corporate Watch that activists saw HS2 workers deforesting large sections of the proposed route “as fast as they could”. Time and time again, they saw trees cut down in front of their eyes and Liz explained that this led to further questions about areas cleared that didn’t seem connected to route maps. Since HS2 is allegedly “meant to be a public infrastructure project, they’re not allowed to be seen to be profiting from the wood that they’re chopping down”.  But protesters still have questions about where “tonnes and tonnes of wood” from these trees went.

Desolation and displacement 

The recent injunctions are simply the latest in an ongoing wave of legislation pushed through by the government to build HS2. Although anti-Hs2 campaigners celebrated when the government scrapped the East Midlands-Leeds stretch of the route, this was only a partial victory. In 2017, it passed a Phase One Hybrid Bill to push ahead with the London to West Midlands section of the route. Phase Two a (West Midlands to Crewe) passed in January 2021 and Phase 2b (Crewe to Manchester) is currently going through parliament. Hybrid bills blend public legislation (which affects everyone) with private (impacting specific individuals or groups). Although used rarely, they create sneaky ways for governments to legally embed corporate destruction because they authorise compulsory purchasing, destruction of conservation areas or changing rights of way as part of major infrastructure projects.

Activists like Liz and Nancy, have seen first-hand the implication of these hybrid bills enabling corporations to benefit from a tax-payer-funded project, and the devastating impact of this legislation for home and land owners along the route. As Liz explained:

The hybrid bill is legislation that gives effectively gives HS2 their own set of laws regarding the construction of this huge mega project. It gives them the sort of ‘legal right’ to get the funding from the taxpayer and to circumvent certain practices (like ecological practices) that other companies or private citizens would have to abide by to get something done. 

A normal construction company would have to go by the rulebook, but the hybrid bill effectively gives them an excuse saying ‘they need to make this train line’ so anything that they want to do to make that happen, they can do.

Nancy continued:

And the other thing that the bill gives the right to do is compulsory purchase land. So this affects anyone unfortunate enough to live on the HS2 route or very close to it. And that’s another important thing to explain about HS2 – it’s such a massive construction project. Some people might think ‘oh, it’s just a train line – that doesn’t sound that bad’. But it’s huge. It’s got to be a certain width – I think about the width of Parliament Square at it’s narrowest.

Then along with all that they’ve got to build all the access roads, they’ve got to build compounds to store all their machinery, they’ve got to reroute other bits of road. And they’ve also got to build several factories, bentonite factories are one of the main ones. It’s not just little country train line, it’s massive. It also needs to be fairly flat. So in places where the land is high, they’ve got to make massive cuttings into hillsides. In places where the ground is lower, they’ve got to build viaducts for the trains to go along. You really, really feel how vast it is when driving around the Chilterns or Oxford areas. Because every road you go down, there are signs, traffic lights, compounds – its desolate.

A lot of people are now displaced. Some people have just had to move out of their houses. Some people have had little bits of their land taken off them… I’ve heard of someone who has a farm and HS2 now owns both of the access roads to it.

And then there are also houses in what’s known as ‘blight’. So if HS2 makes your house completely worthless, they have to buy it but then often end up renting that barn back out [to the previous owner] until it’s time to demolish it. Some people are just sort of left right on the fringes where they’re not in blight, but it’s certainly enough to ruin where they live, with no chance of any financial payment to compensate.

Tax-payer funded destruction

In terms of challenging corporate power, Liz told us that HS2 presented some unique challenges because it’s “a limited company which technically should mean it’s a private company. Mark Thurston [HS2 CEO] earns over half a million pounds a year… so it sounds like a private company but it’s fully funded by the government”. In fact, Thurston is also the UK’s highest-paid public sector employee.

Liz continued:

Essentially, the people that work in the top ranks of it are all civil servants but they don’t have the same accountability processes that an actual civil servant would.

Some of the companies that build HS2 are involved in many other big projects in the UK today. And four huge companies were merged to do some of the building contracts. Those are Eiffage, Kier, Bam Nuttall and Ferrovial. 

Liz said that activists have started to look towards other business ventures these companies engage in. “Kier,’ for example, ‘don’t only build terrible cheap housing, they build vivisection labs. And they are also involved heavily in the construction of the mega prisons planned in the next few years”. As Liz also pointed out, the scope for corporate profit from HS2 is vast and extends far beyond construction.

There’s one [company] called Fusion Fencing, which does all the enabling works for HS2. So whenever a site gets taken, or a compound is built, they’ll come and do all the fencing. The fencing contract is massive. I mean, along 107 miles of train line, that’s a huge, huge contract for fencing for the next 30 years, or something like that. 

And then there are the companies profiting from security. 

Another big contract is for Control Risks Group – the people that essentially supply security services for HS2. You’d wonder why a mega project that has been written into our history as part of the democratic will of parliament needs a security system? That’s something I’ve questioned, but they are running to the tune of about £140 million so far, which is quite an expensive security detail for a train line. Control Risks Group is essentially staffed by a lot of ex-military people.

As early as 2017, Control Risks Group secured contracts worth at least £64 million. The tender contract stated the work required involved “proactive area patrolling, close personal protection and management of locked on protesters”. It also stated the contractor was “expected to be insight led with gathering of insight forming a significant part of the contract”.

Nancy continued:

When you’re on the protest camps, you get to know the different security groups because they have slightly different uniforms. I don’t know exactly who employs specific people, but the lowest level security are ‘fondly’ known as the carrots, because they wear just orange. Then there’s the Black Onyx, they’re very ex-military, and they’re there to add more muscle and are more intimidating. And then you have the IRT who are sent in supposedly for the ‘hairy moments’. They show up where there are protesters, or even when [contractors] do something that they anticipate they will get protesters at – they’re there to forcibly remove people. And they wear all black.

 “A special place to be”

Despite exhaustion from continuous evictions and surviving onsite through all seasons, Liz and Nancy shared insights about the power of activist communities. “For me’ Liz said, ‘the camps acted like a huge flashpoint for so many things that weren’t necessarily just about HS2”.

I encountered conversations around patriarchy and conversations around trans rights, pronouns and land rights – things I’d not really discussed before in my ‘previous life’. It was a real melting point, a melting pot of ideas and ideologies and people in a special place. I met a group of nature defenders with such solidarity for what they were doing and for the campaign.

HS2 was a good follow on from the fracking campaigns. It was the next big culturally important set of camps and activist protests against big government infrastructure and big government plans.

Injunction, Injunction, Injunction

Following news of the injunctions, Corporate Watch caught up with Liz to see how HS2 activists felt:

It’s devastating. It’s completely devastating. They’ve got everything they wanted now, stated in proper case law. They already had legal standing through the hybrid bills and now the judge has given them complete impunity to basically create their own mini-state.

It’s worrying because this affects every campaign from now on. If parliament has decided something should ahead it’ll get the green light like the Rwanda policy or, new coal fields or, North Sea oil or, anything that doesn’t relate to net zero promises or the Paris Climate Agreement. There’s no scope for protesting against them because there’ll be deemed as in the public interest. 

The new injunction potentially threatens using Articles 10 and 11 in the European Convention on Human Rights (EHCR) (which protect the rights of assembly and free speech) as legal defences for protest. Essentially, injunctions like this strengthen Article 1 (A1P1) in the EHCR which protects rights to enjoy “property peacefully” because it prioritises HS2’s ownership of land on the proposed route. This is particularly offensive given how the property rights of the former owners have been destroyed by compulsory purchase orders.

As Liz noted, under this legislation “even slow walking has been completely made illegal. So something that was a tried and tested tactic is impossible to undertake” anywhere near the HS2 route. Liz added:

It seems that the judges dealing with this are not really not in our favour because they assume that parliament is acting in the best interest of all the people in the country. So it’s an uphill struggle to get legal systems to listen.

But Corporate Watch suggested that in some ways, the injunction is also proof that years of protest had a powerful impact – almost a backhanded compliment – to the campaign’s success. Liz laughed saying:

Well, that’s true! We know the reason that this injunction was granted was to stop an imminent threat of nuisance and disruption to the HS2 project. They were worried. The ‘endless guerrilla tactics’ is something that’s cited many times in the ruling. They thought we shouldn’t have the right to endlessly apply guerrilla tactics to HS2 and also that Articles 10 and 11 shouldn’t be limitless. But because of the way we behave, moving from site to site, because of how effective we’ve been disrupting and delaying, yeah, that’s why this has happened really: because it’s been working.

“Never gonna stop”

Looking to the future, now the site-wide injunction is in place, Liz said:

We have to find ways that we can feel good about the way that we move through the world. We’re never gonna stop doing the things that we think are important. I’m never gonna stop doing the things that I feel make a difference.

We just have to find new sneakier ways to go around and circumvent all these draconian rules that are being imposed on us.

 

Images courtesy of Screw You HS2 and Stop HS2

The post Tax-payer funded destruction: Activist reflections on HS2 appeared first on Corporate Watch.

On 16th August 2022, 17 months after the launch of the campaign, T&S owner Phil Kerry relented, explaining:

“I made the decision to give into their demands. We couldn’t fight them anymore because they are too strong.”

We wanted to give Shut Down T&S Rabbits space to share reflections on their successful fight. The case shows how in struggles against corporate power, knowing your enemy can make the difference between success or failure.

Could you tell us why you chose to launch this particular campaign?

For a long time, it felt like the movement bore witness to the struggle of animals. For example, people would get footage from the slaughterhouses. But we felt we needed a win – and this target was obviously something we were going to win. We were looking to the past, with SHAC* for example, and compared to that, here we weren’t looking at a multinational company with a lot of power.

Also, it was very obvious that those rabbits in the farm were suffering a lot. It was a really horrible situation for them. The vast majority of them were not actually being slaughtered; they were dying out of neglect.

The UK has had a prohibition on fur farming since 2000, 22 years ago. He [owner Phil Kerry] found a fantastic loophole to be able to farm fur in 2022 by claiming it’s just a by-product of meat. And that was just such a middle finger to all the activists of the 80s and 90s. Many had gone to prison, and this guy was there farming fur. It was outrageous.

Can you give us an overview of the kind of company you went up against?

I guess we could describe it as Phil Kerry and his group of companies. The rabbit business wasn’t an impressive company, it didn’t make a lot of money, but he owns a lot of companies that do. T&S was a vineyard and plant nursery that had then been transformed into a rabbit farming business. Interestingly, he also has a limestone quarry business called Goldholme that supplies to big companies like Travis Perkins.

As well as the quarrying business, he also had a stone-cutting business. Alongside that, he started a new company called Into the Wild, running shepherds’ huts for glamping.

The campaign involved a strategy of putting pressure on primary, secondary and tertiary targets, which has often been used in animal liberation campaigns. Before we get into details of what went on, can you briefly describe what that means?

The primary target is the main people you’re up against. So in this case, Phil Kerry and T&S.

Secondary targets are any businesses that have some sort of relationship with the main business or person you’re trying to convince, eg. the Goldholme quarry business.

Tertiary companies are involved in the secondary companies. The builders’ merchants Jewson and Travis Perkins were tertiary since they made deals with secondary targets.

Can you give us an overview of the campaign, perhaps a timeline of significant events?

The first thing worth mentioning is that, before the campaign launch, there was a large amount of time and work put in to understand the person and the company.

It is also worth saying that underground [anonymous] activists had been doing liberations for three to four years before the campaign happened, and were raising awareness about the farm. The campaign finally launched in March 2021 after another group, Rabbit Farm Resistance, held some demos there.

The first focus was Rutland Farm, a small farm with 30-40 rabbits. It was next to a nature reserve. The wildlife trust that owned the reserve did not want the farm there at all. It helped it was a very busy location… touristy, and a good place to have a lot of visuals about what was happening there.

So the “Save the Rutland 30” mini-campaign was launched. The first glamping site [of Phil Kerry’s] had been set up there as well. That was useful because it needed to be an idyllic place. There were demos outside, the glamping site got targetted. For instance, there were lots of reviews posted online. They were very upset about that. Since it was a secondary target, you never know if it will affect them.

At some point, we received the news that on Easter Sunday, a group of 30 people, black bloc-style, had gone into the farm in the middle of the day, in front of everyone walking around with their children, and did a daylight raid to free the rabbits. Massive amounts of police showed up, 12 people got arrested, a handful of rabbits got taken back to the farm, but I believe that about 32 rabbits made it out. Obviously we want to make it clear that we are an above-ground campaign group, and while we would never criticise actions and support diversity of tactics, we had nothing to do with the daylight raid.

Arrest-wise, those people are still waiting to hear from the police. We will support them to the fullest. Everybody taking any sort of action for those rabbits deserves the utmost respect and love.

Very soon after, the last rabbits were moved away [from Rutland] and the farm itself was dismantled. We had shut down one of T&S’ farms.

There was then a bit of time where we focused on planning applications. T&S had been applying to get planning permission for rabbit farms in Buckinghamshire and Cornwall. Both of those got denied by the council. We focused on an application in Derbyshire that Phil Kerry was trying to appeal after permission was also denied. There was a lot of outreach in the local area. People would stand in the street in the town centre, give out leaflets and urge people to express their feelings to the council. There were also demonstrations in front of council offices. And we were preparing to oppose it with a barrister, which scared Kerry and he withdrew the appeal.

Scenes from Granby

Can you tell us about the undercover investigations?

People had been collecting undercover footage from East Bridgford for months and releasing it to the public. One of them exposed the neglect the rabbits were suffering, and the dead rabbits that were being taken to a freezer every morning, to end up in a maggot farm used for fishing. Another video showed them throwing the rabbits around and forcing them to breed.

Some underground people [anonymous activists] visiting the sites said that they had found 11 rabbits left with no food or water in two of the runs at Granby, which had been Kerry’s main farm and had since closed. There were huge infections and mites, the photos are horrible. They had just been left to die. They took the rabbits and released a video showing the conditions. The footage they had obtained really showed how gritty and horrible it was up close, and the fact that Kerry would just abandon those rabbits to die – he couldn’t even be arsed to kill them. That upset a lot of people, for sure.

A rabbit rescued from the Granby site by underground activists. Image: Unoffensive Animal

What happened after the success in Derbyshire?

So by the final stage of the campaign, we have the planning applications crushed, and Rutland is gone. The last place is East Bridgford, his main farm. There they had 250+ rabbits, and an application for a rabbit slaughterhouse and dwelling.

There were lots of demos in front of the gates of the farm, as well as a huge effort to reach out to East Bridgford and surrounding villages. Door-to-door leafleting, talking to people… Over 1000 leaflets went out in a day, and there was a 20% return: 200 objections to the planning application had been made within 48 hours. And people objected very emotively as well: they didn’t want to walk past that place with their children.

So we have outreach, demos outside the council, and demos almost weekly now at the farm. We announced a week of action in August, calling for people to take autonomous action in their groups to stop T&S hurting the rabbits and to call for them to be released. People across the country organised. It was beautiful to see.

The first day of the week of action, we woke up to the news that an underground group had gone to two of Kerry’s old sites and smashed up every window, every door, and every wall of the place. There were lots of banner drops around the country. That was really appreciated ‘cos we understand that people live far away and that they can’t come to the farm, but they hate the idea of what’s going on.

During the week, another group did ad-hacking in bus stops with “wanted” posters showing Kerry’s address, as well as pictures of liberated rabbits. On the Sunday, Operation Liberation UK, [another group] announced they were setting up a camp on the verge outside the farm. That forced Kerry to have 24hr security. When we heard about the camp, there was a slightly unsettling feeling. Because it’s a wealthy area, and all of a sudden activists were setting up portaloos and tents. But the locals were incredible! They brought stuff for the camp – including vegan food – they were amazing…

There were multiple reasons for the support. First: no one wants a slaughterhouse in their village. Second: bunnies are very cute. And there was a sense that while some people might not be too comfortable with a temporary camp, having a slaughterhouse would be horrible. Certainly, the amount of outreach helped put the campaign on the map. There was only one local person we heard of who was vocally opposed to the camp.

I cannot emphasise enough just how incredible the locals have been.

On the Sunday, there was the main national demo. We asked for people to come from wherever they were if they could. There were lots of people there and lots of locals came too; it felt powerful. That wrapped up the week of action.

Then we woke up to find that the week of action hadn’t ended. Smash Speciesism, who do very disruptive actions, had gone to Goldhome quarry (another of Phil Kerry’s businesses) and blockaded the gate, stopping any lorries going in. About 10 protestors were there, and three times that amount in police. There were a lot of really upset workers in the quarry, who couldn’t see how the rabbits had anything to do with the place. Smash Speciesism’s aim was to raise awareness that Phil Kerry was supplying limestone to Jewson and Travis Perkins, and was involved in bunny killing. The blockade lasted eight hours. In front of the press, the police said they respected the right to protest, but as soon as the press left, the police tried to arrest everyone, including those just standing there holding placards. People managed to run away, but two were arrested.

Smash Speciesism blockade Kerry’s quarry. Photo: Smash Speciesism

There were a lot of emotions boiling. Calls went out for people to contact these big companies and ask them not to buy from the rabbit killer. The story was covered by the media.

Phil Kerry did a press release, calling it a witch hunt. He said they had nothing to do with fur farming, and that they couldn’t give up as they would just be giving us ammunition if they did. There was more pressure, with people calling and emailing Travis Perkins and Jewson. The next day we received an email from Phil Kerry, signed by a Goldholme worker, saying Kerry was retiring from rabbit farming and asking for the rabbits to be taken away, as long as the protests stopped.


Can you give us an insight into the creative actions that people used in campaigns against T&S? They don’t have to be actions carried out by your group.

It’s important for people to understand that this campaign was heavily reliant on diversity of tactics, and we wouldn’t have it any other way. We were not there to police what people could and couldn’t do. Autonomous groups did sabotage, liberations, ad hacks, organised demos and called up secondary and tertiary targets. We at Shut Down T&S Rabbits didn’t do anything illegal, and our info was obtained from open sources.

Here’s one example of a creative action: Kerry’s Into the Wild business had a stall at a glamping show. It would be their first time going out to sell their shepherd huts. The show was emailed and told what was going on, showing the links between the company and footage from the dead rabbits. It was asked whether it wanted to support the rabbit killer. In the end, the show cancelled their stall.


What do you feel were real turning points?

The campaign against secondary businesses; the glamping site being targetted online; the liberations; the severe pressure T&S received by the camps, which finalised in targetting Goldholme.

But the week of action wouldn’t have worked if it had happened earlier. We had been building up not only our social media and internet presence, but we were constantly keeping our eyes open to all the other businesses. All of that together made the week of action very effective.

One of T&S’ farms

What lessons do you feel can be shared with other campaigners standing up to corporate power?

Strategy, strategy, strategy! Knee-jerk reactions are sometimes necessary, but knowing that they are coming and how to control them is useful.

Building a thorough knowledge of who the company is and what they do is important, because they were doing so much dodgy stuff. Also understanding their personalities, because that could lead to a different strategy.

Never policing actions: as a campaign we don’t take or promote illegal action, but we cannot police what people are doing. People feel a rage inside, and that might be shown in different ways.

Learning about history and how campaigns have happened in the past, and reaching out to older activists and learning from them is super important, because lots of people have loads of experience but may feel slightly alienated or burnt out. It’s about building those bridges and also getting those people back in the game.

Also, practice security culture. Make sure you’re protecting your friends. Create an environment where people feel safe, and they will come.

Finally, be sure of yourself – almost to the point of arrogance. You know you’re going to win and you’re going to do what you need to do to get there. Your convictions should drive you to stop it: you have that power, not the charities, politicians or governments, you have that power.

Rabbits being collected after the closure of T&S Rabbits


What next? Where would you recommend people who have been supporting the campaign put their energies after this?

Seeing that Phil is attempting to start other animal exploitation businesses in order to build houses on his land, it would be very nice to see people organising against that.

Also, Palestine Action is kicking ass and is very impressive. It’s so refreshing to see they have no remorse, because the people making those weapons that are killing Palestinians deserve nothing less. Free the MBR Beagles is also a worthy campaign to analyse strategically.

Overall I would say, people should feel empowered to look at something and say, “hey I don’t like this”, and get a group of mates together and draw up a plan.

It’s good to support other campaigns, it’s super important. But I would love for people to understand that they have the power to do it themselves. If you don’t like something, study it, learn, go for it, and if you can be sure people are safe they will join you. That’s direct action.

We’re really happy the bunnies are now out and we’ve found a home for all 202 of them. But we’re concerned about their wellbeing and will need a lot of funds to make sure they’re all treated by vets, so we’re launching a fundraiser. Everybody that would like to support this effort can donate here.

*SHAC: Stop Huntingdon Animal Cruelty, a long-running international campaign to shut down vivisectors Huntingdon Life Sciences.

All images courtesy of Shut Down T&S Rabbits unless otherwise specified

A printable A3 poster version of the timeline below is available here.

The post Interview: How we shut down T&S rabbit breeders appeared first on Corporate Watch.

This article looking at the charity Migrant Help, is the first in a series of reports examining the corporate interests behind organisations working with refugees and people seeking asylum. We interviewed people working with refugees who had frequent contact with the organisation. We found that:

• Migrant Help has a multi-million pound contract with the Home Office to provide a phone line for people seeking asylum. The service is the primary route for people seeking asylum to gain information or support for all their needs.
• The phone line has been plagued with problems since at least 2015, with callers enduring long waiting times or unanswered calls.
• In fact, it’s struggling so much that it is now subcontracting this phone service out.
• As middlemen between people seeking asylum and the Home Office, asylum accommodation providers or other agencies, it is frequently unclear where the responsibility for problems lands.

‘Migrant (No) Help’

The Migrant Help website gives the impression that they care for and support “people affected by displacement and exploitation”. A prominent donate button navigates you easily to give money to “change someone’s life”. But this refugee charity is not all it seems. As a person working on the front line with refugees told Corporate Watch:

Migrant Help are the ‘bouncers’ of the opaque and Kafka-esque asylum support system. They have a friendly veneer but there are enormous issues with accessibility and delivering on the contract. Phones are not answered. Contact emails are frequently changed at short notice. Escalated emails are not acknowledged.

Migrant Help, formerly Migrant Helpline, is one of the Home Office’s key contractors and the sole official provider of advice and support for people seeking asylum. It is both a charity and a company. It claims to be able to offer telephone advice and support to people seeking asylum on basically any issue. These include navigating the asylum process; applying for asylum support and accommodation; finding a lawyer; accessing healthcare; problems with asylum accommodation (it claims it will liaise with accommodation providers to address issues); welfare issues such as neglect or domestic violence; and asylum benefits payments problems.

People seeking asylum have little choice but to use the Migrant Help phone line because it’s provided through Home Office funding. As some working on the front line explained, the Migrant Help phone service is the only option most people seeking asylum have to ask for help or to report issues, and this creates huge problems.

A one-stop shop might sound like an efficient way to run things. But that approach only works when the service is of the highest quality. If that provider is at the centre of countless stories of unprofessional service, failure to fulfil its duties and abandoning people in its care, the situation becomes disastrous, with a population seeking asylum forced into near dependency on a phone line that so often fails to get answered.

Migrant Help isn’t struggling for money. In 2021, the charity’s total income was over £22 million; £20.46 million of this came from four “government contracts”. These aren’t just any government contracts. They’re all directly from the Home Office. The very same department that hasn’t let up on making life as difficult as possible for refugees and people seeking asylum. It is perhaps no coincidence then that despite receiving millions in Home Office funding, Migrant Help has so often failed to deliver and has consistently let down the vulnerable people it is directly funded to help.

Money, money, money

A look at previous accounts shows that Migrant Help’s income has been steadily increasing since 2017 when it received just over £8 million from government contracts and grants. The contracts increased year on year to £15.12 million by 2020 with another huge leap in 2021.

The charity has received “significant” Home Office funding since 1994. By 2019, it secured a £100 million contract to run the Home Office system called “Advice, Issue Reporting and Eligibility (AIRE)” services, and act as the official point of contact for refugees to get advice on their asylum claims. This was part of a £4 billion award for Asylum Accommodation and Support Services Contracts (AASC) working alongside Mears, Clearsprings and Serco which were tasked with providing asylum seeker accommodation in the UK. By 2021, the Migrant Help contract rose to £235 million, perhaps because the initial four-year contract appears to have been extended to ten; it will end in 2029. This contract pays well for some at the charity. At least one person earns between £120,000 – £130,000 and two people earn £70,000 to £80,000. Meanwhile, the Home Office allocates people seeking asylum £40.85 per week.

Migrant Help financial history graph sourced from Charity Commission.

The AIRE advice contract also involves advising refugees on what to do if their claims are refused. That specifically includes telling them about “the support available to return to their country of origin.” The Home Office has long had a strategy of pushing people to leave through so-called “voluntary” return, and saw Migrant Help as playing an important role in meeting its “removal” targets.

The multi-million-pound contract might suggest that Migrant Help was providing an effective service for the Home Office and actively helping refugees and people seeking asylum. Yet, evidence shows this just isn’t true. Complaints go back to 2015 when Migrant Help was “slammed for leaving refugees destitute”. And it hasn’t stopped.

“Gatekeepers and the face of the hostile environment”

Photo by Ahmed Nishaath on Unsplash

We’re now used to pretty much every service we use having a phone helpline. And we’ve all been there, waiting on the phone for hours while we try to speak to our bank or ‘service provider’. But imagine you’re new to the country, and that ‘service provider’ is responsible for dealing with all major problems: your health, your housing, your money. And imagine how it must feel when that phone line takes hours to answer, or the person who finally picks it up can’t or won’t help resolve your issue. That’s the situation people are forced into because the Migrant Help phone line is their only point of access.

The head of operations with a front-line refugee support charity told Corporate Watch that Migrant Help “are the gatekeepers and the face of the hostile environment. It is a well-known joke that their name should be Migrant no Help”.

And that’s not surprising, because from the quality of the service provided to logged cases of financial precarity and even destitution, the catalogue of evidence against Migrant Help’s ‘support’ is damning:

• In 2017, the Red Cross criticised Migrant Help claiming that since it took on the role of giving Home Office advice to refugees, the situation became “untenable”, with more people being left destitute. In particular, it challenged the decision to replace face-to-face meetings with telephone support.
• A 2020 report from Institute of Race Relations called the AIRE contract “a disaster” and criticised both Migrant Help and housing group Mears. An open letter from over 100 charities ‘warned that the new repairs reporting and advice system was causing “needless suffering among those it is meant to protect”’.
• A 2021 report from the All-Party Immigration Detention Group detailed problems with the Migrant Help phone service endured by refugees in the notorious Penally and Napier detention centres.
• In 2021, problems getting through to the Migrant Help phone line contributed to thousands of refugees being left without access to food or money. The Home office gives people seeking asylum £40.85 per week on Aspen cash cards, but the system totally broke down, with cards not arriving or failing to work. Yet again, the only ‘help’ available was via the Migrant Help phone line. People seeking asylum don’t have access to bank accounts, aren’t allowed to work and rarely have networks of family or friends able to lend cash, so days of delays where Migrant Help doesn’t answer phone calls cause acute hardship and hunger.
• People seeking asylum have been unable to report issues with inadequate housing to Migrant Help. According to the BBC, the Home Office refused to answer Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from refugee charities “about the severity and frequency of complaints, and about how Migrant Help was performing”.
• One successful FOI request revealed that between Sept 2019 to Sept 2021 there were 517 logged complaints against Migrant Help.
• In April 2022 a Home Office report (released through an FoI) implicated Mears, Migrant Help and the Home Office in a crisis for Badreddin Abdalla Adam that ultimately led to him stabbing six people. He’d tried to make contact with Migrant Help for support with his health and accommodation 72 times in the period leading up to the stabbings.

Evidence shared with Corporate Watch echoes these issues are ongoing. Our contact told us that a caseworker asked if Migrant Help could issue a “hardship payment” to someone who’d had no money for several months: “I’ve escalated to Migrant Help and they say it is being investigated. But when I ask, there is no time frame for an answer.”

“People are sick of complaining,’ one hotel resident in the asylum process reportedly said, “because they feel it makes no difference. And you have to complain to Migrant Help”. Someone working with urgent asylum cases reported waiting four hours on the phone before eventually being told by Migrant Help that the issue needed to “’be escalated’, and so they just put me on hold again for another hour”. Meanwhile, a volunteer reported trying to support someone who was homeless and had already waited three days to get into accommodation but reportedly:

When he called Migrant help they had him on hold for 45 mins and then it cut off. His battery went dead and he had to find somewhere to charge his phone and try again to be told there was no update.

Many people seeking asylum don’t have the support of organisations that can escalate things on their behalf. Our contact also explained:

As the unique route to navigate to asylum support, to prevent destitution, people seeking asylum have literally no choice. Even organisations with specialist advisors working in this area still have to go through Migrant Help. Behind the Migrant Help contract, there are the accommodation providers… They then subcontract to security firms, but there is very little accountability. Supposedly people with complex needs such as those with mental illness, survivors of trafficking or with disabilities are given outreach support but this rarely or ever happens in my experience. Partly because trust in the organisation is so low.

The source also explained that in theory, “voluntary sector groups can apply to be commissioned and claim back money for work they do that Migrant Help should deliver”. However, “partly due to reputational risk of not wanting to be associated with Migrant Help” groups are said to frequently deliver the work themselves. But that work is difficult to fund, since the Home Office’s funding to Migrant Help is expected to cover it. This produces “over-stretched charities relying on volunteers, grassroots groups and communities to mitigate the worst impact” of Home Office failures to support people seeking asylum.

Not only is Migrant Help’s near monopoly just not working, but the organisation itself now seems to be subcontracting its duties to run the phone line, in a 3-year tender worth £1.5 million.

A dangerous blame game

The nature of the relationship between the Home Office, Migrant Help and other outsourcing giants such as Mears, Clearsprings and Serco creates additional layers of hardship both for people seeking asylum and those working at a grassroots level to provide support because accountability becomes nearly impossible. Our source told Corporate Watch:

When things don’t happen – such as people not getting the £8 per week cash support they are entitled to when living in hotels for six months; or repairs to houses that are unsafe for disabled children – it’s unclear whether fault lies with Migrant Help, the accommodation provider, the subcontractor, or the Home Office themselves. They all hide behind and blame each other and no one takes responsibility.

Given the litany of complaints against Migrant Help, it’s difficult to comprehend quite how it secured such a huge contract. Since being awarded the multi-million-pound deal, it has still failed to deliver. In fact, a 2020 investigation from the National Audit Office prompted a parliamentary report which scrutinised the Home Office AIRE contract allocation and Migrant Help’s performance.

The parliamentary report summarised that:

• The Home Office admitted faults in issuing AIRE contracts, including that the process was rushed.
• Home Office data showed that on average, calls for support historically took between 12 and 17 minutes. Yet the winning Migrant Help bid was based on a far shorter call length of four minutes on average. When it took up the contract, it was perhaps inevitably then only able to answer a fraction of the calls received between September 2019 and January 2020 (one-fifth, to be precise). The report also notes that the charity Asylum Matters sent written evidence stating “that many asylum seekers and their caseworkers had lost confidence in AIRE and simply stopped calling”.
• There was a lack of scrutiny for very large tenders issued by the Home Office, coupled with a lack of transparency.

The report also criticised the Home Office for issuing many of the AIRE contracts to the sole bidder.

According to the NAO report, Migrant Help promised that it had recruited more people and that the service had improved. The report claimed that in 2020, the charity ”answered 94% of calls within 60 seconds. However, callers are still facing long delays in being transferred to a specialist adviser when required”. And as ongoing media accounts and information given to Corporate Watch reveal, there are still huge problems for people trying to access support.

In safe hands?

Migrant Help’s 2021 trustee report claims that Migrant Help “assisted clients in reporting any issues with the accommodation”. Yet the previous year, Helen Bransfield, Migrant Help director of asylum services, offered little challenge when news broke about the appalling conditions for asylum seekers housed in the near-derelict Napier army barracks in Kent. This doesn’t quite tally with the horrific reports about conditions at Napier reported by refugees and local volunteers. Migrant Help wasn’t responsible for providing this sub-standard accommodation. However, it’s not clear whether the accommodation providers – Mears and Clearsprings – failed to act on the complaints; or whether Migrant Help failed to report them – or both. But there’s no doubt that the lack of transparency hinders accountability, leaving many people seeking asylum in a dire situation.

Meanwhile, Migrant Help’s near monopoly on asylum advice has severe implications for the quality of service. Put simply, there is little motivation to do a good job, particularly when the government’s policy is to make life as difficult as possible for refugees. The trustee report also notes that Migrant Help was “concerned about the reputational damage” and “considerable negative press coverage” about conditions at Penally and Napier. Yet It makes no mention of the people forced to live there. Migrant Help reported two other “serious incidents” to the charity commission in 2021-2021.

There also seems to be a revolving door linking some in the Migrant Help management team with other Home Office AASC providers. Juliet Halstead, Migrant Help’s deputy director of asylum services, spent a year working for Mears. She’s listed as head of housing for G4S under the Home Office Compass contract (which predates AIRE) between 2012 and 2019. G4S is the notorious security firm which ran multiple UK detention centres and supplied guards to carry out deportations; its history is embroiled in violence against migrants. Halstead joined the company at a time when it was facing intense scrutiny following the 2010 death of deportee Jimmy Mubenga. And while she worked there, G4S guards were secretly filmed throttling detainees at Brook House detention centre. Halstead was also at G4S when it subcontracted Jomast (run by Stuart Monk) to provide asylum seeker housing. During this time, Jomast painted the doors of refugee houses red which led to ongoing racist attacks. At the time, G4S “repeatedly denied” being aware of any complaints about this until the story broke in the national media.

Meanwhile, Andrew Billany, a former CEO of Migrant Help is now a trustee and director for criminal justice charity Nacro. Nacro was previously linked to G4S when it entered a bid to build and help run two prisons in Merseyside.

Systemic Failure

Migrant Help seems inextricably linked to the failures of the accommodation providers who share in this £4 billion deal. It’s impossible for asylum seekers and refugees, or those working on the front line to support them, to access any real help without going through this charity. From leaving vulnerable people waiting hours to even hear a voice at the end of a phone, to actively propping up the hostile environment by pushing voluntary return, Migrant Help is simply a cog in the ongoing racist cruelty against refugees.

If you want to help people seeking asylum, please avoid the Migrant Help ‘donate’ button. Instead of giving to Migrant Help, support grassroots initiatives providing direct support such as:

• Right to Remain provides multilingual information to empower people seeking asylum.
• Local groups around the UK such as Manchester Refugee Support Network or Bristol Refugee Rights which offer direct support for people going through the asylum system.
• Asylum Matters working locally and nationally to improve the lives of refugees and people seeking asylum through social and political change.
• Refugee Community Kitchen which provides meals for displaced people in the UK and France.

———–

Correction:

This article was corrected on 16 August. We incorrectly stated that Jimmy Mubenga’s death occurred during Juliet Halstead’s tenure at G4S. We have since been made aware that Halstead joined G4S two years after the death of Jimmy Mubenga and was not working there when it occurred. We have amended the article to clarify this.

The post Migrant ‘No’ Help: the Home Office’s charity gatekeeper appeared first on Corporate Watch.