The Independent | June 11, 2013
By Toby Green
The world’s richest man and the world’s biggest security company are working on the same team.
Bill Gates, the Microsoft founder and philanthropist, has been revealed as an investor in G4S, with a stake of more than 3 per cent. The investment is divided between the charity run by him and his wife, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and his asset management firm Cascade Investment.
The security giant is working to restore its reputation after its chief executive, Nick Buckles, quit last month after a profits warning that saw shares in G4S plummet nearly 15 per cent in one day – the latest in a string of embarrassments.
Before last year’s Olympics fiasco, when a failure to provide enough staff resulted in the Army having to be called in, angry shareholders forced the abandonment of a £5.2bn takeover of the Danish cleaning group ISS in 2011.
