prevent their nationals from importing arms to Sierra Leone. Spicer maintains neither he nor Sandline did anything illegal: Spicer has claimed that he always has called for greater involvement of the British government in the PMC issue. In fact, Col. Spicer said that six weeks before the arms-to-Africa affair blew up, Sandline had submitted a paper to the Foreign Office calling for greater regulation, but had not yet received a response. At the time, with no government response, Sandline was considering setting up its own oversight committee, including a senior retired general, a lawyer and a representative of the media. In late 1999, Spicer left Sandline, which kept operating until 2004. The next year, he launched Crisis and Risk Management. In 2001, he changed the company's name to Strategic Consulting International and also set up a partner firm specialising in anti-piracy consulting, called Trident Maritime. In 2002, Spicer established Aegis Defence Services, which around the beginning of the Iraq War was consulting for the Disney Cruise Line. Aegis Defence Services Spicer was Chief Executive of Aegis Defence Services, a PMC based in London, until replaced by Major General Graham Binns in 2010. The chairman of the Aegis board of directors is former Defence minister, Nicholas Soames MP. The Board of Directors include: General Sir Roger Wheeler, Chief of the General Staff; Paul Boateng, former Labour Minister and ex-High Commissioner to South Africa and Sir John Birch, former British deputy ambassador to the United Nations. In October 2004, Aegis won a $293 million three-year contract in Iraq outsourcing, among other things, intelligence for the U.S. Army. Criticism by US Senators In 2005, following the award of this contract, five United States Senators – Charles Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Ted Kennedy, Chris Dodd and John Kerry – wrote a joint letter calling on Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld to investigate the granting of the Aegis contract describing Spicer as "an individual with a history of supporting excessive use of force against a civilian population" and stating that he "vigorously defends [human rights abuses]". In a December 2005 letter to his constituents, then-U.S. Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) called on the Department of Defense to withdraw its contract with Aegis. Obama wrote that "The CEO of Aegis Defense Services Tim Spicer has been implicated in a variety of human rights abuses around the globe ... given his history, I agree that the United States should