Two G4S executives resign over Olympics shambles

By Charles Maggs

Two senior executives at G4S, the company that botched security at the Olympics, have left the company - but chief executive Nick Buckles remains.

Chief operating officer David Taylor-Smith and head of global events Ian Horseman Sewell quit the global security firm after its Olympic contract was estimated to have lost the company around £50 million.

The Sussex-based firm confirmed the departure of the men in a statement to the stock exchange this morning.

"The monitoring and tracking of the security workforce, management information and the project management framework and practices were ineffective to address the scale, complexities and dependencies of the Olympic contract," the statement read.

"Together this caused the failure of the company to deliver the contract requirements in full and resulted in the identification of the key problems at a very late stage."

The announcement comes after a damning investigation into G4S' role in Olympic security by PWC.

Mr Buckles had previously admitted to MPs that the Olympics had been a "humiliating shambles" for the company, but the report effectively cleared him of any substantial wrongdoing.

The failure to fulfil their Olympic contract provoked anger amongst the public as members of the armed forces had to fill the security void, many of whom had come straight from deployment in Afghanistan.

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