This week’s release of financial results from South Africa’s State-owned electricity supplier Eskom was always going to be worth watching. It marked the first public engagement of a fresh board of directors installed 69 days earlier by a forceful new political head. The occasion lived up to its billing.
US representative asks Justice Department unit to explain why McKinsey names many fewer connections to interested parties than its competitors.
Alec enjoyed a front row seat at the first public engagement by Kevin Sneader, new global managing partner of the world’s largest consulting firm, McKinsey & Company – the business in the vortex of South Africa’s State Capture scandal.
It’s clear that South Africa’s equivalent of Brazil’s eight year old Operation Car Wash has arrived. In the South American country more than 160 mostly powerful politicians and business executives have been arrested.
McKinsey reached a settlement with Eskom and a unit of the prosecuting authority that will enable the management-consulting company to return the fee it earned on work for the electricity producer.
Kevin Sneader has inherited a huge South African problem, courtesy of McKinsey’s facilitation of Gupta-inspired corruption at Eskom and Transnet.
The Guptas and their associates deserve every drop of bile now being poured over them. But so too do the multinationals which facilitated their thievery.
Like companies exposed by Brazil’s Operation Car Wash, McKinsey is sure to pay heavily for treating South Africans like mushrooms.
Iraj Abedian, respected and principled CEO of Pan African, isn’t buying spin doctoring from corrupted and deeply implicated KPMG and McKinsey.
Veteran South African markets commentator David Shapiro is in top form in this, the latest episode of the Old Firm where him and Alec Hogg swap notes on the hot topics of the past week.