G4S jettisons Israel
1) FT: G4S exits Israel as profits plunge and blunders build;
2) Times of Israel: Security firm G4S leaving Israel, denies BDS to blame;
3) Morning Star: G4S ‘Exits’ Toxic Israeli Contracts;
4) Electronic Intifada: Landmark boycott victory as G4S says it is leaving Israel, includes inset on AGM disruption;
A protester holds posters against the G4S security company outside Israel’s Ofer Prison in May 2013. Screen capture: YouTube
G4S exits Israel as profits plunge and blunders build
By Gill Plimmer, Financial Times
March 12, 2016
G4S is the biggest security company in the world but it still sets alarm bells ringing with surprising frequency — a record it added to this week as it announced a fall in profits.
The company mismanaged the guarding of the 2012 London Olympic Games and was later forced to admit it had charged the UK government for electronically tagging criminals who were already dead. More recently, staff were caught on camera allegedly abusing teenagers at a youth offenders institute in Kent, south-east England.
The noise has finally got to Ashley Almanza, the publicity-shy head brought in to restore the company’s fortunes in 2013.
G4S has already exited a contract to clean the US detention centre at Guantánamo Bay and on Wednesday said it would quit Israel, where it employs 8,000 staff, some of whom install security equipment at prisons in the West Bank.
Pro-Palestinian campaign groups, which have pursued their cause in human rights tribunals, declared the announcement their victory.
Mr Almanza may be hoping the change in strategy will buy a quieter life. But a lossmaking contract housing asylum seekers in Britain has cost it £31m and may leave it with a further £57m bill by the end of the decade.
With pre-tax profits falling 40 per cent to £78m in 2015, and cash flow down 13 per cent to £460m, it is the debt that is increasing — up £143m to nearly £1.8bn last year. As the share price hovers around 183p, its lowest since autumn 2008, it is investors who are now clamouring for attention.
Security firm G4S leaving Israel, denies BDS to blame
London-based company says ‘commercial reasons’ behind decision to sell its Israeli business, which employs 8,000 people
By Tamar Pileggi, Times of Israel
March 10, 2016,
British-based global security firm G4S announced it was selling its business in Israel. It said it was doing so for “commercial reasons” and not because of a boycott movement against Israel.
While announcing its 2015 results Wednesday, G4S said it was selling its business interests in Israel as part of a portfolio review that will see the sale of some 60 other businesses as well.
The company has been the target of a years-long campaign by activists calling for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel. G4S employs 8,000 people in Israel.
The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign claimed G4S’s pullout was a result of its pressure on the company.
However, G4S spokesman Nigel Fairbrass on Thursday said the decision to sell its business in Israel was “entirely” for commercial reasons.
One of the largest security firms in the world, the London-based G4S provides screening and other services to a number of Israeli organizations, including CCTV cameras installed in Tel Aviv, screening equipment used in the prison system, and security for courts.
The company’s dealings with Israel, especially over the Green Line, have prompted a number of government and educational bodies to boycott G4S in recent years.
In 2013, the company announced it would partially divest from Israel in response to tension over its West Bank operations.
Citing its own ethics policy, G4S said it would let expire contracts to provide screening equipment at the Ofer Military prison near Ramallah, at West Bank checkpoints and at a police station in the contentious E-1 area east of Jerusalem.
Those contracts expired in 2015.
Last month, the BDS movement kicked off its 12th annual Israeli Apartheid Week in the UK by hanging dozens of anti-Israel posters in the London Underground, with one of them attacking G4S for “securing Israeli apartheid.”
Next to a picture of a Palestinian child being restrained by an IDF soldier, the poster read “Over 500 Palestinian children are held without trial at G4S equipped Israeli prisons every year.”
The campaign also accused the firm of doing “whatever it takes to secure profits,” and said Palestinian minors are subject to sexual abuse, torture and forced confessions.
The powerful image used on the G4S poster was taken during an August 2015 altercation between IDF soldiers and Palestinian activists protesting the construction of an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. An all-out brawl ensued after protesters attempted to stop an Israeli soldier from arresting 12-year-old Muhammad Tamimi, who was suspected of throwing rocks at IDF vehicles nearby.
Photos and videos of the incident flooded social media.
London officials said the posters were hung in the underground network without permission, and they were quickly removed.
G4S ‘Exits’ Toxic Israeli Contracts
Global pressure forces security firm out of apartheid state
By Peter Lazenby, Morning Star
March 11, 2016
PALESTINIAN solidarity activists claimed victory yesterday after notorious security firm G4S announced it was ditching its contract with the apartheid state.
G4S chief executive officer Ashley Almanza said that “in the next 12 to 24 months” the company expected to “exit” a number of businesses “including G4S Israel.”
He said the contract — which includes involvement in Israeli prisons, checkpoints, police training centres and illegal settlements — was being dropped “to improve our strategic focus.”
But the Palestine-based international Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) national committee said the real reason was the growing impact of the international campaign against G4S, which has already lost major contracts because of its involvement in Israel.
The group’s Mahmoud Nawajaa said: “As at the height of the international boycott of apartheid South Africa, BDS pressure is making some of the world’s largest corporations realise that profiting from Israeli apartheid and colonialism is bad for business.
“Investment fund managers are increasingly recognising that their fiduciary responsibility obliges them to divest from Israeli banks and companies that are implicated in Israel’s serious human rights violations, such as G4S and HP, because of the high risk entailed.
“We are starting to notice a domino effect.”
And the chair of one of Britain’s most active Palestine Solidarity Campaign groups said there was no doubt that the pressure on G4S triggered the decision.
Manchester BDS group co-ordinator Norma Turner said: “We have been campaigning against G4S for the last four years, pressing Manchester Council to drop its contracts with the firm, demonstrating outside G4S’s headquarters, and generally working to make G4S a toxic brand.
“All this, and the international campaign, have been the main factor behind this decision.”
Organisations to have dumped G4S include trade unions, universities and United Nations bodies.
BDS said the campaign against G4S should continue, demanding G4S quit Israel “immediately” — not in 12 to 24 months.
G4S is also to sell off its contracts to run child residential homes and youth secure centres in Britain following revelations of abuse and ill-treatment at Medway Secure Training Centre in Kent.
Landmark boycott victory as G4S says it is leaving Israel
By Ali Abuminah, Electronic Intifada
March 10, 2016
G4S, one of the world’s biggest security and imprisonment firms, has announced it plans to end all its business with Israel within the next 12 to 24 months.
Palestinians are welcoming the news as a major victory and a sign of the powerful impact of the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) movement.
But they also warn that pressure on the company must continue until it has actually ended its role in Israel’s violations of the rights of Palestinians, especially thousands languishing in Israel’s prisons.
The announcement makes G4S the latest multinational company – following transport and municipal services firm Veolia, telecom giant Orange and construction materials conglomerate CRH – to head for the exits in the wake of sustained campaigns by the BDS movement.
“Reputationally damaging work”
G4S announced on Wednesday that it plans to “exit a number of businesses,” including G4S Israel, US “youth justice services” and UK “children’s services.”
The Financial Times said that by ending these businesses, the company would be “extracting itself from reputationally damaging work.”
Since 2010, G4S has lost contracts worth millions of dollars as a direct result of activist campaigns.
Stop G4S, a global campaign endorsed by the Palestinian BDS National Committee, aims to hold the company accountable for providing equipment and services to Israeli prisons in which thousands of Palestinian political prisoners, children and administrative detainees are subjected to inhumane treatment.
‘For the fourth year in a row, the Annual General Meeting of security company G4S was invaded by demonstrators protesting the company’s involvement with Israeli prisons, where Palestinians are allegedly tortured.’
From IBT, June 2015.
G4S also provides equipment for checkpoints along Israel’s wall annexing Palestinian land in the occupied West Bank and for its settlements built in violation of international law.
The firm also co-manages the Israeli police academy in Jerusalem.
Lost contracts
In recent months, G4S has lost contracts with two UN agencies in Jordan and with an international Colombia-based restaurant chain.
Other lost clients include universities and trade unions. The Bill Gates Foundation and the United Methodist Church in the US divested major shareholdings from G4S.
“As at the height of the international boycott of apartheid South Africa, BDS pressure is making some of the world’s largest corporations realize that profiting from Israeli apartheid and colonialism is bad for business,” Mahmoud Nawajaa, a spokesperson for the Palestinian BDS National Committee (BNC), said in a statement.
“Investment fund managers are increasingly recognizing that their fiduciary responsibility obliges them to divest from Israeli banks and companies that are implicated in Israel’s serious human rights violations, such as G4S and HP, because of the high risk entailed. We are starting to notice a domino effect,” he added.
But the BNC also sounded a note of caution, pointing out that G4S announced in 2013 that it would end its role in illegal Israeli settlements, checkpoints and one Israeli prison by 2015, but failed to implement the withdrawal.
In 2014, G4S announced it would not renew its contract with the Israel Prison Service, set to expire in 2017, but is yet to implement that decision, the BNC also noted.
“G4S has a track record of breaking pledges to end its participation in Israel’s crimes so BDS campaign pressure on G4S will continue until it actually sells its Israeli subsidiary,” Nawajaa stated.
“No immediate effect”
Sahar Francis, director of the prisoners rights group Addameer, also welcomed the news, but cautioned that “this has no immediate effect on those facing human rights violations inside Israel’s prisons today.”
“At a time when Israel is stepping up its campaign of mass incarceration as a way of repressing Palestinian society, G4S should end its role in Israel’s prison system immediately, as well as its role in maintaining Israeli checkpoints and illegal settlements,” Francis added.
There are currently 7,000 Palestinians imprisoned by Israel, according to Addameer.
The Israeli human rights group B’Tselem revealed last week that the number of Palestinians held by Israel on “security” grounds at the end of 2015 was at the highest level since July 2010.
Brad Parker, an attorney and international advocacy officer for Defense for Children International – Palestine, also pointed out that abuses continue.
“Ill-treatment and torture of Palestinian children arrested by Israeli forces is widespread, systematic, and institutionalized in the Israeli military detention system, which relies on G4S equipment and personnel to maintain a number of Israeli prisons and interrogation centers,” Parker told The Electronic Intifada.
“While the planned pullout of G4S is welcome news, without justice and accountability and an end to prolonged Israeli military occupation, Palestinian child prisoners will continue to suffer ill-treatment and torture at the hands of Israeli forces.”
And campaigners are also pointing out that the abuses G4S is involved in range much further afield than Palestine.
“From the US to Palestine, from South Africa to the UK, G4S works across the world to maintain injustice and oppression. We remain determined to work closely with partners to hold G4S to account for its participation in human rights abuses,” the BNC’s Mahmoud Nawajaa said.
Nawajaa welcomed the news that G4S is getting out of the youth detention business in the US and the UK, “both of which have been shown to involve abusive practices by G4S and both of which are part of deeply racist incarceration systems.”
Sign of strength
While activists clearly see much more work to be done, they have no doubt that G4S’s announcement is a sign of their strength.
The BNC acknowledged the role of activists in many countries in pressuring G4S.
In the UK, activists attended the company’s annual general meeting in London every year, “dominating the … proceedings with questions to the board about G4S’s involvement in Israeli prisons,” the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) noted.
“G4S was one of the biggest targets of the BDS movement, and its decision to disinvest from Israel is a landmark victory in the ongoing struggle for Palestinian freedom and self-determination,” PSC interim director Sara Apps said.
“Failing to stop the impressive growth of BDS in pursuit of freedom and justice, Israel is desperately trying to smear and delegitimize our nonviolent movement, including with anti-democratic laws in Europe and the US aimed at silencing dissent and suppressing our freedom of speech,” the BNC’s Nawajaa said in reference to increased repression of the BDS activism.
“We believe strongly that our ethical approach and just cause will prevail, as this latest G4S announcement shows.”