"McKinsey is a very different firm today than when these matters first took place"<p>No they are most certainly not. Corruption is in McKinsey's DNA. Outside of the specific harms that McKinsey has caused across the country and across the world, management consulting groups in general have been utilized to sidestep legal protections against corporations within a shared industry colluding against each other. Companies like McKinsey, Bain, Accenture, etc., have been instrumental in the rapid increase of executive compensation, flat comp for workers compared to inflation, intentionally unsafe practices and corner-cutting to save money, and just generally creating as many negative externalities as possible in the name of feeding the beast that Milton Friedman created with his rhetoric about the primacy of the shareholder.<p>A good read on this topic is "When McKinsey Comes to Town" by Forsyth and Bogdanich. There's a whole chapter dedicated to the South African bribery scandal. Sagar was not just a bad apple -- the company itself is the rot.
As a South African, this is good news (it would have been nice if the payment was higher and more people at McKinsey were held accountable). Unfortunately we are unlikely to see accountability locally for whoever actually paid this bribe. The background is that this was part of the program of State Capture enabled by our former president (Jacob Zuma) and a very dubious family from India: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gupta_family" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gupta_family</a>. Our country was basically sold to the highest bidder - people speak of 'ten lost years'.
It's impossible to do business in Africa without bribing people, all these laws do is put Western companies at a tremendous disadvantage compared to Chinese ones.
AFAIK Ursula von der Leyen was minister of defense, she funneled gov consulting contract to McKinsey without an obligatory bidding process. Even some public employees were shocked by her behaviors. Worse, her son works for McKinsey.<p>In the end, who cares?
Remember the name McKinsey. They are an evil organization that does bad things to good people. Anyone from McKinsey is to be regarded with suspicion at the very least.
Of course, the company of concern is Eskom, the underperforming state electricity monopoly whose incompetence has dragged the South African economy down.
Not to defend your typical mendacious megacorp and its dishonest ways, but we should also focus attention on the other site of this equation, the governments operating in many countries.<p>They're usually pervasively, profoundly corrupt across many levels and will often actively encourage a culture of massive bribes by creating a regulatory environment so stifling that no other means of getting any project or major process done exists. Often they'll simply ignore their own laws to stop investment projects until someone coughs up money on an extra-official basis.<p>I'm not talking about these governments honestly and in good faith creating and applying regulations for the well-being of their own nation. I'm referring to laws so byzantine that they're in place more as a dragnet for bribes, which is applied only selectively on a pay as you go & stop when you don't basis.
So why is this money paid to the <i>US</i> government?<p>Shouldn't it go to the south african government, since south africas taxpayers were the ones harmed?
How do we justify deregulation with situations like McKinsey, Boeing, FTX, Silicon Valley monopolies, etc.? It doesn't make sense to me that people who want competitive, safe markets and consumer protection don't use these endless examples.
> How many uplifting McKinsey projects like "more snuggles at the puppet factory" or "make grandma live forever" would you need to hear about to effectively counterbalance "turbocharge the opioid epidemic," "help fuck up Rikers even more," and "make a Saudi Arabian snitch list"?<p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiOUojVd6xQ</a><p>Great video by John Oliver, as always.