Pension reform, management of the Covid-19 vaccination campaign, election campaigns… McKinsey is the common thread running through the policy pursued by Emmanuel Macron since his arrival at the Élysée, as reflected in the title of the investigation broadcast by France 2 as part of its Cash Investigation magazine, “McKinsey, a firm at the heart of power”.
During Emmanuel Macron’s first term, Le Monde counted nearly 1,600 missions carried out by private consulting firms on behalf of ministries and their agencies, a large proportion of which were carried out by the McKinsey firm.
The first meeting between Emmanuel Macron and McKinsey took place 10 years before he entered the Élysée in 2007, when the future president was a financial inspector and deputy general rapporteur of the Attali commission. He notably met Karim Tadjeddine, then head of McKinsey’s consultants. Three years later, in 2010, the two men joined the board of directors of the think tank “En temps réel”, and met Thierry Cazenave there.
In 2014, Emmanuel Macron called on Karim Tadjeddine as a McKinsey consultant to help him define the outlines of a bill he called NOÉ, for “New Economic Opportunities”, which would never see the light of day.
Once at the Élysée, Emmanuel Macron created the interministerial directorate for public transformation (DITP) and appointed Thierry Cazenave to its directorate, who oversees all the missions ordered from private consulting firms, including McKinsey. Karim Tadjeddine, for his part, is in charge of these missions for the State within the American firm. A proximity that is intriguing.
Especially since around ten McKinsey consultants participated in Emmanuel Macron’s 2017 campaign in an “active” or even “intrusive” manner and above all on a voluntary basis, according to the “MacronLeaks”, a data leak before the 2017 presidential election. In February 2021, Le Monde revealed that this assistance from McKinsey to candidate Macron’s campaign left no trace of an invoice from the firm in the party’s campaign accounts.
Services that are prompting the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office to open a judicial investigation in 2022 for “non-compliant campaign account keeping” and “understatement of accounting items”. The aim is to establish whether McKinsey did not provide the En Marche candidate with services that should have been included in the campaign accounts.
But above all, another judicial investigation has been opened for “favoritism” and “concealment of favorability” to determine whether McKinsey did not obtain, in exchange for these services, public contracts once Emmanuel Macron was in power.
At the heart of this second judicial investigation is the Senate report which describes as a “sprawling phenomenon” the use of consultancy firms by the State since Emmanuel Macron took office.
In the investigation he signed for Cash Investigation, the journalist Donatien Lemaitre listed the contracts obtained by McKinsey during Emmanuel Macron’s first five-year term, from three state organizations: 39 million euros for the DITP headed from 2017 to 2019 by Thomas Cazenave, who worked alongside Emmanuel Macron and Karim Tadjeddine within the think tank “En temps réel”.
32.5 million for the Union of Public Purchasing Groups (Ugap), the largest central purchasing body in the State, and 1.3 million for the markets of the State Purchasing Directorate (DAE). That is 72.8 million euros in orders. Over the period 2018-2021, a calculation by Le Monde estimated around forty missions for the government or various State agencies for a total of between 28 million and 50 million.
The justice system wants to clarify whether these contracts are the counterpart of the work provided by the teams of the consulting firm during the campaign. It is now seeking to establish whether these contracts are legal and were the subject of a competitive tendering process, as required by law for public procurement contracts.
Chicxulub. According to Le Nouvel Obs, this is the code name of the operation launched in September 2015 by Karim Tadjeddine to help Emmanuel Macron win the 2017 presidential election. A name that owes nothing to chance: it is that of the asteroid that crashed into the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico 66 million years ago, causing the extinction of the dinosaurs, a metaphor to illustrate the end of the “old political world” with the election of Emmanuel Macron.
To achieve this goal, several meetings took place from September 2015 to February 2016, sometimes at Bercy and sometimes at McKinsey’s offices, with Karim Tadjeddine at the helm, the magazine continues. In all, 25 meetings were held with the aim of developing a website to launch Macron’s candidacy.
McKinsey is enjoying growing success in France. However, between 2011 and 2020, despite a turnover of several hundred million euros, the company paid no corporate tax, reveals the Senate inquiry committee on consulting firms.
Faced with the accusations, McKinsey claims not to have generated any profitability in France, a first for a consulting firm in this period, then explains that it paid “422 million euros in taxes and social security contributions”, without distinguishing between corporate tax and social security contributions paid on its employees’ salaries. McKinsey also explains that one of its subsidiaries had actually paid corporate tax for six years, without providing further details on the amounts.
According to the senators, McKinsey deducted from its taxable profits in France numerous fees charged to other entities of the group located abroad, as if they were service providers. A mechanism called “transfer pricing”, which is legal to the extent that the group does not abuse it.
Suspicions which led to the opening of an investigation by the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office for aggravated money laundering of tax fraud.
Since the election of Emmanuel Macron, McKinsey has been at the heart of decisions taken at the head of state. In a non-exhaustive list established by Le Monde, and based on public data, we discover the contracts that have been entrusted to the consulting firm.
They were thus asked to carry out several missions during the Covid crisis for an amount greater than 12 million euros: acceleration of the vaccination strategy against Covid-19 for 2.9 million, support for vaccination against Covid for 2.6 million, but also vaccination logistics for 1.2 million.
Other missions concern the pension reform and its implications for the national old-age insurance fund (Cnav), or the evolution of the teaching profession, a mission whose content was made public which cost nearly 500,000 euros, or 3,312 euros per day of consultant mobilized, and whose use of “McKinsey did not present any demonstrated interest”, criticizes the Senate in a report.
With a turnover of several billion euros, McKinsey multiplies contracts throughout the world, to the point of seeing its reputation tainted by several controversies. The firm is even the subject of a book by two journalists from the New York Times, “McKinsey, for better and for worse”. It “works more and more for authoritarian governments all over the world or for public companies that contribute to consolidating the power of the latter”, write the authors of the live, reports Le Monde.
In the United States, at the beginning of the century, McKinsey advised the company Enron, whose CEO had spent more than 20 years at McKinsey. Except that the company artificially inflated its profits and masked its losses by using shell companies to inflate its stock market value. The scheme was exposed, the company collapsed. McKinsey’s responsibility was highlighted by the financial press.
The consulting firm’s role in the opioid scandal in the United States is also being singled out. According to documents provided by the plaintiffs, the consulting firm recommended that pharmaceutical groups concentrate their products with the most addictive dosages because they are more lucrative. Between 1999 and 2018, 500,000 Americans died from opioid misuse. In February 2021, McKinsey agreed to pay $573 million to settle lawsuits filed by 49 US states.
In 2023, an AFP investigation revealed how the consulting firm McKinsey influenced the organizers of the COP28 summit to continue using fossil fuels, oil and gas in the lead, recommendations contrary to those of the International Energy Agency.
In South Africa, McKinsey was implicated in a corruption and money laundering scandal in 2018, and agreed two years later to repay sums received through contracts linked to the corruption.
Such a multiplicity of clients sometimes leads to conflicts of interest. McKinsey was able to have simultaneously as clients American pharmaceutical companies and the federal agency that ensures the safety of drugs authorized for sale in the country, illustrate the journalists who wrote the investigation into McKinsey.
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