Olympic Fiasco Firm G4S Wins Tagging Contract from French Justice Ministry

G4S, the world's biggest security firm has won a multi-million euro contract from the French government to provide devices for the electronic tagging of offenders in France.

G4S has been selected to work alongside French consortium partners Thales, the largest defence electronics makers in the Europe along with French security firm Onet.

The contract with the French Ministry of Justice is worth €80m ($107.6m, £68.2m) in total, of which major part will be paid to G4S and Thales, according to a Reuters report. The contract is initially for a period of four years and can be extended to six years.

"We are delighted with the opportunity to work with the French Ministry of Justice. Its electronic monitoring programme has grown to be one of the largest in the world with over 10,000 offenders monitored at any one time and this growth is expected to continue," said David Byrne, Managing Director of G4S Monitoring Technologies in a statement posted in its website.

The development came as a respite for G4S whose reputation has been tarnished over its failure to provide enough guards for the London Olympic Games. Following the firm's Olympics fiasco, it had even missed out the deals to run six prisons in the UK including the Wolds in northern England which the group was managing since 1992.

G4S is expected to reach a financial settlement on the contract with the Olympic organisers to the tune of £240m.

Recently, the firm had won a seven-year meter reading contract worth at least £150m with British Gas.

Last year, the firm entered in to £13m ($20.59m) deal to monitor offenders in Scotland using GPS technology. Other contracts include a deal to lay fibre-optic cables in Brazil and a contract to provide security checks at Oslo airport.