After London Olympics Debacle, Security Firm Shuffles Top Managers

LONDON — A British company that failed to provide promised security staff for the London Olympics, forcing the army to deploy troops to make up the shortfall, on Friday announced a partial purge of its senior management. 

In a statement after an internal investigation, the company, G4S, said David Taylor-Smith, the chief operating 0fficer, and Ian Horseman Sewell, the managing director global events, had resigned. But the chief executive, Nick Buckles, who acknowledged his company’s shortcomings to a parliamentary panel before the summer games, kept his job.

John Connolly, the newly appointed chairman of the company, declared: “G4S has accepted responsibility for its failure to deliver fully on the Olympic contract. We apologize for this, and we thank the military and the police for the vital roles they played in ensuring the delivery of a safe and secure games.”

In July, before the games started, lawmakers grilled Mr. Buckles about his company’s failure to meet contractual obligations to provide a guaranteed security staff of 10,400, and he acknowledged that his company’s performance had been a “humiliating shambles.”

Nicola Blackwood, a Conservative legislator on Parliament’s Home Affairs select committee, said at the time, “I had very little confidence in G4S fulfilling this contract before this session started, and now I don’t have any confidence at all.”

The Games passed without notable security scares as the British authorities ringed the Olympic site in east London with a deterrent force, including warplanes and ground-to-air missiles, separately from troops who supplemented GS4 staff and police officers in routine security procedures.

In the statement on Friday, the company, one of the world’s biggest security providers, said the “Olympic contract was unique in terms of scale and complexity, but notwithstanding this, the company was capable of fulfilling the contract; the issue was in its delivery.”

“Although the company recognized the unique and complex nature of the Olympic contract from an early stage, this was not properly reflected in its handling of the contract,” the statement said.

“The monitoring and tracking of the security work force, management information and the project management framework and practices were ineffective to address the scale, complexities and dependencies of the Olympic contract,” the statement continued. “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.”

Despite the departure of two senior managers and a reorganization of some other management posts, the statement said it was “in the best interests of the company and of all its stakeholders that Nick Buckles should remain” chief executive since a company investigation “did not identify significant shortcomings in his performance or serious failings attributable to him in connection with the Olympic contract.”

Mr. Buckles has been chief executive since 2005 and has overseen growth at the company reflected in a soaring share price. But the Olympics debacle threatened the company’s relationship with the British government, one of its main customers, at a time when the authorities are looking increasingly to outsource work, including prison management and other contracts.