Two U.K. Companies Apologize, Pledge Donations Over Slavery Legacies

Two U.K. companies — insurer Lloyd's of London and pub chain Greene King —are apologizing and pledging charity donations after research publicized how founders had benefited from the slave trade.
An academic database put together by The Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownership recently detailed that founders of Lloyd's and Greene King received compensation linked to slavery.
One entry shows that the British government paid Greene King founder Benjamin Greene to surrender several plantations in the Caribbean after the country abolished slavery in 1833.
The Telegraph newspaper, which first reported the story, estimates that Greene received the equivalent of £500,000 (or more than $620,000) at today's rate.
At least one founding subscriber of Lloyd's, Simon Fraser, was shown to have received an equivalent of £400,000 (or roughly $497,000) for an estate on the Caribbean island of Dominica, according to the database and Telegraph estimates.