Aegis Defence Services

Based in London, the company was founded by former Scots Guard Tim Spicer who made headlines with the Sandline affair when he was caught shipping 30 tons of arms to Sierra Leone in apparent violation of a UN weapons embargo and arrested in the abortive coup in Papua New Guinea. One of his friends, the ex-SAS officer Simon Mann, is in a Zimbabwean jail accused of plotting a coup in Equatorial Guinea. Frederick Forsythe, the author of “Dogs of War�, is one of its shareholders.

The firm recently signed a new contract with the Pentagon worth $145m (£79m) over protests from its American competitors. This is an extension of the earlier $293 million “cost plus� contract that it had signed with the Pentagon in May 2003. According to Naomi Klein, the CPA's Project Management Office contracted with the firm to protect its employees from "assassination, kidnapping, injury and "embarrassment." In a separate contract, the firm also provides security for employees working on the Iraqi Oil-for-Food corruption inquiry.

The firm employs a total of 930 people in Iraq and besides co-ordinating communications between coalition forces, civilian contractors working on reconstruction projects, and their private security firms, it also provides bodyguards for senior American and Iraqi officials. It operates one national and six regional command-centres and acts as a link between coalition forces and civilian contractors on security issues, relaying information on rebel activity.