McKinsey’s Dealings With Despots Are More Extensive Than We Knew

The past few years have seen a range of published reports regarding the work that America’s top consulting firms, led primarily by industry behemoth McKinsey, have done on behalf of despotic clients abroad. In dribs and drabs, we’ve learned that McKinsey has cozied up to the dictatorship in China, even going so far as to host its corporate retreat within spitting distance of the concentration camps that Beijing uses to forcibly imprison ethnic minorities like Uyghurs. We’ve also learned that McKinsey has been embedded within the despotic regime in Saudi Arabia, helping steer the Saudi regime’s investments and image-laundering efforts.

These reveals, however, are but a small peek behind a curtain that McKinsey has long kept closed. Thanks to a range of readily available tricks and dodges, from foreign lobbying loopholes to the use of cut-outs, McKinsey has kept its roster of reprehensible clients largely secret for years—from the public and, increasingly, from legislators in Washington as well. But now, that’s beginning to change—and the details regarding the who’s who of despots that McKinsey has serviced, and raked millions of dollars from, are finally spilling into the open.

The freshest revelations have emerged thanks to a joint investigation led by the Center for Climate Reporting and The Guardian that dropped late last month but didn’t receive nearly enough public attention. Scraping multiple court databases, researchers discovered that McKinsey had submitted “hundreds of pages of conflict-of-interest declarations”—and, in the process, revealed a constellation of clients previously hidden from public scrutiny. While much of the focus of the probe centered on the fact that McKinsey’s clients “include some of the world’s biggest polluters”—completely undercutting McKinsey’s professed claims to be a leader in decarbonization—the report also illuminated McKinsey’s myriad foreign clients, many of which the firm has never bothered to disclose in foreign lobbying filings elsewhere.

As those filings detail, McKinsey worked with “state-linked ventures” in nearly two dozen countries (including some of the biggest oil-producing nations in the world). Among those were countries previously linked to McKinsey, like China. According to the new documents, the firm worked directly with state-owned firms like Sinopec and the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, “receiv[ing] significant revenue” from these regime-controlled firms. These revelations flew in the face of the company’s previous claims that it had never knowingly worked for Beijing. Part of that defense rested on McKinsey’s claims that its work in China—which included, among other things, directly helping craft Chinese military and economic policy—was led by McKinsey’s internal think tank, rather than the firm itself. (As if there is a meaningful difference between the two entities.)

The new revelations also shone a bright light on McKinsey’s work for the tyrannical regime in Saudi Arabia. Even after Saudi used McKinsey’s research to specifically target and smother regime critics, the firm continued working with the regime—and continued helping the Saudi government expand its influence. The details of the new investigation focused on how McKinsey helped the Kingdom “find new markets for the kingdom’s oil”—with the firm, according to one person familiar with its efforts, doing “a shitload of work” for its Saudi clients.

But McKinsey’s foreign work didn’t stop there. As investigators discovered, the firm has significantly expanded its relationship with Narendra Modi’s government in India, even as Modi has degraded Indian democracy, lurching New Delhi toward outright authoritarianism. According to McKinsey’s managing partner Bob Sternfels—who had previously refused to comply with congressional subpoenas about the firm’s work abroad—the firm is aiming to double its size in India in the coming years. As part of its work on behalf of Modi’s government, McKinsey helped lead “performance improvement plans” at several state-owned oil refineries, even bidding on projects to increase India’s oil exploration—bringing that much more boodle to Modi’s government in the process.

The hits keep coming. As the investigation uncovered, McKinsey had also worked directly with the most prominent financial institutions in Russia—even after Russia first launched its invasion of Ukraine. As the court records reveal, McKinsey identified “Sberbank of Russia” as one of its clients. It’s unclear from the documents what, exactly, McKinsey did on behalf of the Russian firm. But when the U.S. specifically sanctioned Sberbank in 2022, American officials described the bank as one that is “uniquely important to the Russian economy,” as well as the “largest financial institution in Russia,” helping bankroll Russia’s devastation of Ukraine. The same goes for other Russian clients that McKinsey serviced, such as the oil company Gazprom, the major Russian bank VTB, and further entities buttressing Moscow’s war machine—all of which the documents now reveal as McKinsey patrons.

The list of McKinsey’s foreign clients runs on and on. There’s the Emirates Group, owned by the dictatorship in the United Arab Emirates. There’s Qatar Petroleum, overseen by that firm’s namesake regime. There’s the Kuwait Petroleum Corporation, the primary piggy bank for the autocrats in Kuwait. There’s the authoritarian regime in Angola, the military dictatorship in Egypt, firms in despotic countries like Equatorial Guinea—the roster appears bottomless.

Taken together, it’s a shocking rogues’ gallery of wayward states and tyrants. Outside of perhaps North Korea, there doesn’t appear a regime (or regime proxy) that McKinsey wasn’t willing to ink as a client. Over and again, the consulting firm provided its talent and its resources to the most malignant regimes on the planet, helping strengthen their rule and increase their revenue, with little apparent concern for what the costs on the ground would be. There was, by all appearances, little concern for things like democratic decline or climate destruction, let alone what McKinsey’s work aiding such regimes might mean for global stability or the ongoing march of dictatorships.

But then again, perhaps none of this is surprising. For years, the reputation of America’s consulting industry, led by McKinsey, has taken a beating elsewhere, not least for its role in inflaming such maladies as America’s opioid crisis. Whatever publicly palatable sheen the industry once enjoyed has largely disintegrated after years of rancid behavior and cynical wheeler-dealings. These new revelations should only hasten that well-deserved reputational decline. Where McKinsey may once have been the go-to destination for clients looking for consulting advice, it’s since become something else entirely: a consigliere for despots looking to entrench their regimes, enrich themselves, and endanger the rest of us in the process.