What was claimed
Prince William secretly owns Serco.
Our verdict
False.
Prince William does not own Serco
12 April 2023
What was claimed
Serco owns Obamacare.
Our verdict
Obamacare refers to legislation passed in 2010 that aims to allow more Americans to be covered by health insurance but has proved controversial. Nobody “owns” it as such. Serco has won contracts with the US Health Department, including those around health insurance.
Posts on Facebook and Instagram have claimed that Prince William “is the secret owner of Serco”.
The Prince of Wales is not the owner of Serco. This claim appears to stem from a decade-old YouTube video that pointed to job vacancies at the company based in the Virginia county of Prince William.
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Prince William doesn’t own Serco and Serco doesn’t ‘own Obamacare’
Serco is a British company that provides defence, justice, immigration, transport and health services in the UK and abroad. It is well known for providing outsourced public services in the UK from running prisons and immigration detention centres to waste services for some local authorities and facilities management for parts of the NHS.
Its five largest shareholders are named in the company’s 2022 annual report and none are Prince William. The Duchy of Cornwall, the private estate that provides an income to the eldest son of the monarch, so Prince William, also isn’t one of them.
The post also claims that Serco “owns Obamacare”.
Obamacare is the colloquial term for the Affordable Care Act, a US law passed in 2010 that made multiple changes to the American healthcare system, with an aim to make health insurance affordable to more people, but it has proved controversial.
While Serco has won several contracts relating to healthcare in the US, including some specifically relating to delivering Affordable Care Act reforms, it doesn’t “own” Obamacare, which is legislation that covers both the expansion of Medicaid (a government programme providing health insurance to certain Americans) and makes changes to how private health insurance companies operate.
Where did this claim come from?
The earliest mention of this claim Full Fact could find online was in a 2013 YouTube video titled “Prince William OWNS Obama Care!”
In it, a woman also claims: “Obamacare has been taken over by Serco, they took over the contracts”.
In the video, the woman shows a Google search for “serco prince william” and the first two results are for “Serco Jobs, Employment in Prince William, VA”.
The woman in the video says: “They’re telling you exactly who is in control subliminally over that Obamacare and over everything else. It is Prince William.”
Prince William is the name of a county in the US state of Virginia. It was named in the 1700s, after Prince William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who died in 1765 and was one of King George II’s sons. Its name is not connected to the current Prince of Wales, who was born in 1982.
Serco operates in the US, so it seems likely that jobs with the company may have been available there. Its head office is in Virginia, although not in Prince William county.
Image courtesy of Paul Townley
This article is part of our work fact checking potentially false pictures, videos and stories on Facebook. You can read more about this—and find out how to report Facebook content—here. For the purposes of that scheme, we’ve rated this claim as false because Prince William is not the secret owner of Serco.