G4S facing the boot from FTSE ethical list

G4S could be booted out of a leading ethical index as soon as next month after it was blacklisted by Norway’s state wealth fund for its human rights track record.

The security services group has been a member of the FTSE 4 Good Index – run by the London Stock Exchange Group’s FTSE Russell subsidiary – for the past three years.

The index puts an ethical stamp on companies that are judged to be environmentally and socially responsible.

But G4S’s inclusion has come under fire after the £780bn Norwegian government pension fund last week excluded it from its investments over an ‘unacceptable risk’ it contributed to abuses against its staff in the Middle East.

FTSE Russell staff will meet in December as part of a routine twice-yearly review to decide whether firms still deserve to be on the FTSE 4 Good.

They have wide-ranging criteria to decide which firms appear on the index and can also suspend them or put them on a watchlist in response to one-off events or ‘controversies’.

In the index’s ‘Ground Rules’, it says it ‘monitors news outlets for controversies in which FTSE 4 Good constituents are implicated’.

The outcry follows a three-year investigation by the Norwegian fund’s ethics committee, which concluded that migrant G4S workers in Qatar and the United Arab Emirates had to pay recruitment agencies fees to work for the companies, were harassed, had their passports confiscated and were paid less than agreed.

Vaidehee Sachdev, senior research manager at investor charity Share Action, said: ‘The fund’s decision to blacklist the company from its portfolio, and the ethics council’s distressing findings hitting the headlines, are clear evidence of G4S’s unsuitability for FTSE 4 Good.’