Euphemistically named South Africa-based mercenary corporation, closesly associated with the British soldiers-for-hire group Sandline International. Executive Outcomes has around a thousand employees, and is made up mostly of black veterans of South Africa's Special Forces, though officers (both corporate and military) tend to be white, and is armed mostly with surplus South African and Soviet equipment, including at least 20 Soviet Mi-24 and Mi-17 helicopter-gunships.
EO works to support the interests of large mining corporations, most notable the De Beers diamond monopoly and the FreeportMacMoran conglomerate, and is supposedly also used as a deniable asset and intelligence source for enforcing South African and British foreign policy in politically sensitive parts of the undeveloped world.
EO is a privately held corporation, and the while nature of its corporate structure is very difficult for outsiders to ascertain, evidence has come to light implying that the major stockholders are the ownership of the supposedly separate group Sandline International, through a series of intermediaries and holding companies in Hong Kong.
EO's most notable operations were its intervention on behalf of the (nominally communist) government of Angola in 1995, a two year operation in Sierra Leone to hold the mines open against the RUF, from 1995 to 1997, for which they were payed 500,000 dollars a month, and a brief intervention in the breakaway Papua New Guinea island of Bougainville, which held valuable copper resources.
Lately EO and Sandline have been trying to break into the business of peacekeeping. Their rationale is that most First-world armies can't afford the losses and PR problems associated with intervening in dirty wars in their former colonial possesions, so they should contract the work out to private armies. Their efforts have included extensive lobbying with their contacts in the intelligence groups of the British Commonwealth, and a New York Times op-ed by Dogs of War author Frederick Forsyth.