Eurest Support Services

Eurest Support Services (ESS) is a subsidiary of the catering company Compass Group PLC specializing in harsh-environment large-scale food service and facilities management. Its primary clients are military forces and other security services, major defense contractors, and construction, mining, and oil exploration and production facilities worldwide.

ESS first came to wide public light in 2005 after being embroiled in the multibillion-dollar United Nations procurement scandal. It was reported that ESS used a broker company in New York City to get United Nations procurement contracts in West Africa with the help of a corrupt U.N. official, Alexander Yakovlev.

Separately, it was also the subject of a public hearing in 2007 by the United States House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform for its role in security contract arrangements for its staff and equipment while providing dining services to the US Army in Iraq as a subcontractor to Halliburton subsidiary KBR.

News reports in 2005 described a multimillion-dollar contract to provide food to U.N. peacekeepers in West Africa awarded to ESS days after Andy Seiwert, a senior executive at ESS, allegedly received confidential bid information. At the time U.N. officials estimated the total value of ESS food contracts with the United Nations in West Africa at $237 million, with renewals and add-ons that could reach $351 million.

Attached to the e-mail were commercially sensitive U.N. documents that no one outside of highly restricted circles within the U.N. was supposed to have access to; and that the contracts committee itself would not ponder for five more days.

Such information is considered top-secret by the United Nations, and is submitted in a sealed-bid process that U.N. officials have touted as foolproof.

ESS's business development executive Andy Seiwert had a vital interest in it. Siewert was the ESS/Compass executive described by sources close to the U.N. as having the most frequent day-to-day contact with the scandal-plagued UN procurement department. That contact included frequent meetings with Alexander Yakovlev (UN procurement).

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