So, international firm Carillion has collapsed this week - a company that had services in a large range of areas, including transport, military, schools, hospitals and the NHS and maintaining prisons. Carillion was funded by the government and several banks - 38% of their revenue came from the government in 2016, including - £1.9 billion. It is also known to have received investment from HSBC, Barclays and Santander.

Carillion also boast on their website about branching out to Canada, the Middle East and North Africa on top of their English base.

Now that the background and scale of Carillion is out of the way (as well as its funding), there are a few things about Carillion that worry me.

Firstly, Carillion has a large involvement in the NHS and is the largest provider of NHS resources management. The NHS is a field of concern due to the Jimmy Savile scandal of free access to Stoke Mandeville Hospital and his 60 odd sexual abuse victims, aging from 8 to 47. Savile had close connections to Members of Parliament, including Margaret Thatcher who Savile asked for donations to Stoke Mandeville multiple times (which is why the government funding concerns me.) He also knew Tony Blair, and attended parties thrown by Tony himself.

This article from 2 years ago quotes a barrister from the Savile case who suggests that there are still some volunteer groups that may be able to take advantage of patients and pose a risk to them.

Barrister Kate Lampard, whose review of Savile's offending across NHS institutions made a series of recommendations, said many volunteer programmes at hospitals still "pose a potential risk to patients" due to inadequate checks, while stricter controls are needed so they are not under threat from celebrity guests.

She went on to say this about Savile:

His status was "enhanced by the endorsement and encouragement he received from politicians, senior civil servants and NHS managers", she told a London press conference.

This is nagging me. It seems like a warning that abuse is ongoing, and I keep seeing Carillion pop up in every field - healthcare, education, military, law etc. They branched out so far...

Secondly, Carillion managed supplies & services for almost 900 schools and built 150 buildings, generously providing:

Health & safety services

Grounds maintenance

Capital works

Property maintenance

The construction of 150 schools is a slight red flag because of cases like this one described by Ted Gunderson, in which a pre-school had tunnels built under it to transport children into a building next door and from there were prostituted in the community (although obviously, on its own, constructing 150 schools doesn't give any evidence.)

In this article, an MP conveys frustrations about government attempts to delay and ignore discussions about sexual abuse and violence in schools, which suggests to me that it is a prevalent issue. The connection that Carillion has to prisons also raises alarm bells in my head about the potential to avoid the law, but that is just speculatory.

The worrying part of this information is this detail about legally hidden spending costs between the government and Carillion

Government departments and agencies are legally obligated to disclose details of their contracts with private companies. However, there is no widely-used central database and the information is not published in a standard format. As a result, the OpenOpps dataset – which comes primarily from Tenders Electronic Daily, the European-wide record of public tenders and contract awards – is only a partial indication of the government’s relationship with Carillion.

“There’s no data for schools or universities and most NHS bodies don't publish,” says Ian Makgill, founder of OpenOpps. “I think we're missing 50 per cent of their spend.”

I don't like how that sounds. I'm suspicious, but can only find a limited range of information on them - anyone want to look into it to find anything more?

To conclude, it is my suspicion that a major outlet for paedophilia and corruption may have just gone down, and we could be a lot closer to justice considering how large a company it was.