He whispered in Emmanuel Macron’s ear during his 2017 campaign. In times of a pandemic, he was there to work on the country’s vaccination strategy. And recently, he also reflected on the “evolution” of the teaching profession. All in exchange for large sums. The prestigious consulting firm McKinsey has been under fire from critics since the hearing, Tuesday, in the Senate, of two of its directors, who have struggled to justify the important contracts pocketed in recent years from the State. What were these contracts? What exactly are the elected officials accusing this cabinet of? We take stock.
Where does the controversy come from?
The controversy crystallized around the hearing of two associate directors of the firm McKinsey, Karim Tadjeddine (in charge of the Public Sector pole at the French office of McKinsey) and Thomas London (in charge of the Public Health pole), heard in the Senate on Tuesday 18 January. The subject of the commission of inquiry? “The Growing Influence of Consulting Firms on Public Policy”.
The consulting firm, founded in the United States and present in some sixty countries, has been commissioned in several major government files, at great expense. A report from the National Assembly already underlined that between March 2020 and February 2021, €11.35 million had been spent by the Ministry of Health on seven consultancies, including McKinsey, which received €4 million from the ministry.
What kind of contracts have been won by McKinsey?
McKinsey was particularly mobilized during the pandemic. In 2021, Le Canard Enchaîné, Politico, Point and Mediapart revealed that several consulting firms, including McKinsey, Accenture and JLL Consulting, had been approached by the government for advice on the vaccination campaign that had just started. The contracts were particularly important: McKinsey received 2 million euros monthly for its service, and Accenture 1.2 million euros monthly.
In detail, McKinsey, notably received 605,000 euros for the creation of a “strategic control tower” at Public Health France, and 170,000 euros for the placement of a McKinsey liaison officer with Public Health France, responsible for coordinating vaccine logistics, pointed out the Senate.
Another invoice sent to the Ministry of National Education has been particularly controversial in recent days. For 496,800 euros, McKinsey was commissioned to assess “developments in the teaching profession” and organize a seminar to “reflect on the major trends and expected developments in the education market”, explained Karim Tadjeddine facing to senators.
Most, as France info reveals this Friday, the seminar planned by the cabinet did not take place because of the pandemic. A note of 200 pages was drawn from this research, but this note was not really exploited thereafter, according to several sources of France info.
Before the pandemic, in 2019, McKinsey also received 920,000 euros for a benefit from the National Old Age Insurance Fund, to support the preparation of a potential pension reform – a major and particularly sensitive subject of the Macron five-year term. . This mission “made it possible to identify a certain number of adjustments in the organization, beyond the preparation of a reform”, summarized Thomas London in front of the senators.
What do the Senators accuse the cabinet of?
The Senate criticizes McKinsey for being very involved in coordination, advisory or organizational missions within the State, for contracts worth several hundred thousand euros. These firms are not themselves called into question but the choice to use them, when several of these missions could have been carried out internally, disturbs the elected officials. “Don’t you think that there are civil servants within our administration who could carry out this mission? “, thus asked the communist senator and rapporteur of the Eliane Assassi commission, to Karim Tadjeddine, about the famous “liaison officer” with Public Health France. “Yes,” he replied.
Asked about McKinsey’s role during the anti-Covid vaccination campaign, Thomas London defended “extraordinarily intense coordination work”: “You have to bear in mind that designing such an operational infrastructure in such a short timeframe is an issue that an administration is confronted with only very episodically,” he added.
The Senate also raised suspicions of proximity between the cabinet and the teams of Emmanuel Macron. In 2017, several McKinsey employees would have supported the candidate during his election campaign, according to a survey of the world published in 2021. Karim Tadjeddine was himself targeted by the Macron Leaks: his professional e-mail address was found in the multiple communications illegally revealed between the two rounds of 2017. The associate director of McKinsey also participated in the book “The State in start-up mode” (of which Emmanuel Macron signed the preface), coordinated by Thomas Cazenave, now interministerial delegate for public transformation (DITP), the structure which itself commissioned McKinsey for certain assignments.
How does the firm respond?
The leaders of the McKinsey firm claim to have only carried out logistical, coordination and/or “benchmarking” actions, ie comparison with other public institutions in the world. In short: they deny having made political or strategic decisions. “We had no role in defining the vaccine strategy. Choices such as who to vaccinate, in what order, those on the vaccination pass, communication actions: all these elements were excluded from our scope of intervention, ”assured Thomas London.
For Karim Tadjeddine, the involvement of a private firm in government work is even normal: “advising the public sector is now a common practice (…), particularly in Germany, the United Kingdom or in the countries Scandinavians,” he said. “We have codified all of our commitments in a code of conduct, and defined specific intervention rules for intervening in the public sector. »
How does the government react?
For the moment, the government has only reacted to the financial aspect of the controversy. Questioned in turn by the commission of inquiry last Thursday, the Minister of Transformation and the Public Service Amélie de Montchalin assured that in 2022, the consulting expenses of the ministries would drop “by at least 15%”.
This reduction will be limited to the scope of “transformation and strategy”, she defended. “The goal is for us to be able to have this same logic in other consulting segments, especially IT and digital,” she said. Over the period 2018-2020, 145 million euros per year were spent by the ministries in council, again according to the minister.