Its best-known customer (and majority-owner) is Tesco, a British supermarket with a Clubcard loyalty-card scheme that generates a mind-numbing flow of data on the purchases of 13m members across 55, 000 product lines.
They had in mind a steady flow of favours in the form of state assets sold cheaply, free floats of public money to enrich their banks, tax breaks, licences for this and contracts for that.