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The UK has Given Over £1 Billion to a Visa Outsourcing Company Owned by Trump Advisor
The UK government gave over £1 billion to a global outsourcing firm owned by a former economic advisor to Donald Trump to process visa applications for the Home Office in 2023.
Between September and November 2023, the Home Office awarded four contracts to process applicants for four regions of the globe: Africa, the Americas, Asia/Asia Pacific and China and Taiwan, awarding a total of £1,037,000,000 to VF Worldwide Holdings, part of the VFS Global company.
In 2021, US private equity firm Blackstone paid “$1.12 billion for a 75% stake in VFS Global… The enterprise value of the deal is $2.5 billion, wherein the company has debt of around $1 billion,” according to VCCircle. Blackstone is chaired by Stephen Schwarzman, who was the head of Donald Trump’s Strategic and Policy Forum. The forum was disbanded following comments from Trump that were “deemed supportive of white supremacists”, according to CNBC.
Schwarzman also has links to the financial network of the Koch brothers, and has attended their organising meetings of wealthy right wingers who campaign to remove government regulations holding their businesses back. He has been described by Jane Mayer in her book Dark Money as “something of a poster boy for Wall Street excess”, after the 2007 IPO of…
