Is there a extra repugnant international consulting agency than McKinsey? The massive 4 audit corporations have lengthy been implicated in main scandals and the facilitation of tax avoidance and evasion. McKinsey’s rivals, Boston Consulting and Accenture, has had its personal controversies, however McKinsey presently stands atop the pile of corruption.
Earlier this month, McKinsey agreed to pay US$122 million after the US Division of Justice prosecuted it for bribes to authorities officers in South Africa between 2012 and 2016, for which one senior companion pleaded responsible. Based on the DOJ:
McKinsey Africa, performing by way of a senior companion and for the good thing about McKinsey, agreed to pay bribes to then-officials at Transnet SOC Ltd. (Transnet), South Africa’s state-owned and state-controlled custodian of ports, rails and pipelines, and at Eskom Holdings SOC Ltd. (Eskom), South Africa’s state-owned and state-controlled vitality firm.
Between no less than 2012 and 2016, McKinsey Africa obtained delicate confidential and personal info from Transnet and Eskom relating to the award of profitable consulting contracts and submitted proposals for multimillion-dollar consulting engagements, whereas figuring out that South African consulting corporations with which McKinsey Africa had partnered would pay a portion of their charges as bribes to officers at Transnet and Eskom. On account of the bribery scheme, McKinsey and McKinsey Africa earned income of roughly $85,000,000.
The agency has additionally been charged in South Africa in relation to its position in what was primarily a corruption free-for-all throughout the disastrous presidency of Jacob Zuma.
Additional, final week McKinsey agreed to pay US$650 million in fines to finish its long-running prosecution by the DOJ in relation to its position within the opioid disaster and its work for Purdue Pharma.
“McKinsey schemed with Purdue Pharma to ‘turbocharge’ OxyContin gross sales throughout a raging opioid epidemic — an epidemic that continues to decimate households and communities throughout the nation,” the DOJ mentioned. Whereas it was working to maximise opioid consumption, McKinsey was additionally working with the Meals and Drug Administration on the regulation of opioids, with out telling the regulator of its battle of curiosity.
Between 2011-21, the demise toll from the US opioid epidemic was greater than 400,000 folks — for unintentional deaths alone — together with an estimated 10,000 suicides. Purdue was the third-largest vendor and thus third-largest contributor to those deaths — helped by McKinsey.
But inexplicably, this poster baby for all the things that’s rotten, morally and intellectually bankrupt, and discredited about consulting, continues to be persona grata within the corridors of energy and within the media.
This calendar 12 months, McKinsey has, based on AusTender, been awarded $17.4 million in contracts by the federal authorities. In 2023 it acquired $14.3 million. Since 2015, McKinsey has acquired greater than 1 / 4 of a billion {dollars} from taxpayers.
And the most important funder of McKinsey in Australia? Satirically, it’s the Division of Well being, which has handed the corporate $68 million in contracts since 2015, at the same time as McKinsey enabled the US opioid epidemic, to maximise the income of Purdue and its personal income from that firm.
Should you had been a reader of The Australian Monetary Overview, you’d be throughout the crimes of McKinsey. It carried accounts of each the opioid and South African settlements. But curiously the paper’s editors persist in holding McKinsey in excessive regard. Simply as particulars of McKinsey’s South African settlement had been rising, the AFR’s neoliberal financial correspondents, John Kehoe and Michael Learn, trumpeted a McKinsey report that purported to indicate Australia was in an financial “nationwide emergency” — based on McKinsey, this was as a result of there’s an excessive amount of spending within the, erm, well being and caring sector (although not on consultants, clearly).
The AFR editorial in flip endorsed the report as having “laid naked Australia’s nice stagnation“. Kehoe and Learn then repeated their protection of the report time and again‚ apparently tired of McKinsey’s file of misconduct.
“Australia is now an financial ‘downside baby’: McKinsey” was the headline for the “nationwide emergency” report talked about above. The plundering of South Africa, and tens of hundreds of useless People, recommend it’s not Australia that’s the issue, chaps.
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