Gulliver

Gardaworld was originally named Trans-Québec Security Inc when it was founded in 1995. (It was renamed in 1999). It provides armoured-car services, airport passenger screening, access control systems and internal corporate fraud investigations in Europe and the U.S. It also provided security services for embassies and military bases in Afghanistan and Iraq as well as to fossil fuel companies around the world.

In 2012, Gardaworld employees were caught in Afghanistan with dozens of unlicensed AK-47s and they were jailed for three months. In 2014, the head of Garda’s Afghan operations, Daniel Ménard, was jailed for three weeks because of similar issues. In 2015, Gardaworld took over Aegis, a British owned security company that was working in Iraq at the time. Aegis and Gardaworld stood accused of recruiting child soldiers from Sierra Leone to work in their security operation in Iraq.

General Electric is a major military and nuclear contractor. Founded in 1892, it has been charged with radioactive and toxic waste dumping hundreds of times. One major source is the 91 nuclear power plants in 11 countries that use General Electric nuclear reactors such as those used in Fukushima, Japan. Company plants also discharged millions of pounds of toxic polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) that it used in the manufacture of electrical transformers into the Housatonic River in Massachusetts and Hudson River in New York, despite the fact that the company was aware of the health problems caused. In 1999, the company paid $250 million for the pollution of the Housatonic and it has spent $1.7 billion cleaning up the Hudson.

GEO Group was created in 2003. Previously it was part of the Wackenhut corporation. It runs private prisons, immigration detention centers and mental health care facilities as well as rehabilitation and reintegration services. It runs over 100 facilities in the U.S. with a capacity of over 80,000 inmates.

Several civil suits have been brought against GEO Group over inmates’ injuries due to riots and poor treatment. American Civil Liberties Union has accused the company of torturing whistleblowers at its private immigration detention facility in Aurora, Colorado. It has also been accused of for forcing detainees to work for minimal wages as low as $1 a day. In March 2023, a Washington state jury ordered the comnpany to pay $17.3 million in back wages to inmates.