Wellington, Nov 7 NZPA - The Commerce Commission has cleared a Danish company's local subsidiary, ISS Holdings NZ, to buy up prisoner transport work Chubb New Zealand carries out for the Corrections Department.

Corrections was last year reported to be facing a bill of up to $30 million to implement the recommendations of an Ombudsmen's report into prisoner transport, after 17-year-old Liam Ashley was murdered in a prison van in August 2006.

George Charlie Baker strangled Ashley and stomped on his head in a van taking them to Auckland Central Remand Prison at Mt Eden.

Chief Ombudsman John Belgrave and fellow ombudsman Mel Smith criticised the majority of prisoner transport undertaken in New Zealand as "inhumane".

They recommended sweeping physical changes to the transportation of prisoners, as well as policy changes to improve consistency between Chubb, police, and Corrections.

The Government announced at the time that Chubb, the company responsible for transporting Ashley, wanted to withdraw from its Corrections contract.

Corrections chief executive Barry Matthews said it would cost $20m to $30m to implement the ombudsmen's recommendations.

The Government has since insisted on waist restraints for prisoners during transport.

Chubb has also had problems with its home detention work -- a Napier woman last summer had the remaining months of her home detention sentence cancelled after one month when it was discovered the Chubb monitoring system could not transmit properly from her home.

Commerce Commission chairwoman Paula Rebstock said the proposed acquisition is not likely to substantially lessen competition in the manned security market.

"ISS will continue to be constrained by existing competition," she said today.

The "static guarding" business in which the Danes are buying a stake is the stationing of a guard at a customer's premises, and the "mobile" business it is buying involves dispatching security guards to alarms or checks on homes or businesses. Chubb will retain its business to install and monitor home detention alarms, but will subcontract to ISS the monitoring and response work it regards as part of its mobile services.

ISS is a wholly owned subsidiary of ISS Global A/S, a company incorporated in Denmark, and its manned guards work -- for both static and mobile work -- is done through a wholly-owned subsidiary, First Security Guard Services Ltd.

Chubb will initially transfer part of its manned work -- including prisoner escorts between prisons and court for the Department of Corrections -- to a subsidiary, Security Salesco NZ Ltd, and then sell that company to ISS NZ.

In addition to static and mobile guarding, it will also sell off its event management work, providing security guards for sports events and concerts.

First Security estimated that 65 percent of event management services were provided by specialist operators such as Red Badge, Allied Security, Strategic Security, and Red Key Security, and Chubb and First Security combined have only 10 percent of that market.

Chubb has 1300 staff based at 19 offices. The existing overlap between the two companies was only in Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, but ISS said it is effectively buying a bigger "footprint" to provide services nationally.

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