A former senior partner at McKinsey & Company was sentenced on Thursday to six months in prison for destroying records that shed light on the firm’s role in the national opioid crisis.
The partner, Martin Elling, 60, had pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice as part of a federal case against the firm and its efforts to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during an overdose epidemic that had already killed hundreds of thousands of people. McKinsey agreed to pay $650 million to end that investigation last December.
The records purge happened in 2018, when Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, was facing multiple lawsuits. Mr. Elling emailed a colleague who worked with him on the Purdue account, writing: “It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything” other than “eliminating all our documents and emails. Suspect not but as things get tougher there someone might turn to us.”
Mr. Elling was fired after The New York Times reported about the exchange in 2020.
After he sent that email, Mr. Elling proceeded to delete files related to his work with Purdue, according to the Justice Department, which performed a forensic analysis of his laptop.
In a statement on Thursday, Mr. Elling’s legal team confirmed the sentencing and said he “fully accepts responsibility for his conduct, for which he is extremely sorry.” Besides the six-month prison term, handed down in Federal District Court in Abingdon, Va., Mr. Elling will serve 1,000 hours of community service over two years of supervised release.
McKinsey’s work with clients around the world has come under intense public scrutiny in recent years, leading the firm to pay out more than $1.5 billion in fines and penalties. Last year, McKinsey’s work in China was the focus of a Senate hearing, and the firm agreed to pay more than $122 million to resolve a bribery investigation involving a branch in South Africa.
In response, McKinsey has taken steps to change the way it picks clients, subjecting potential work to more internal reviews. The firm says it has stopped advising tobacco companies and some clients in authoritarian countries. McKinsey no longer works on opioids and has issued several public apologies for its efforts with Purdue, a relationship that spanned roughly 15 years and brought about $93 million in fees to McKinsey.
“We are deeply sorry for our past client service to Purdue Pharma and the actions of a former partner who deleted documents related to his work for that client,” the consulting firm said in December when it settled the Justice Department investigation.
McKinsey’s more than 700 senior partners are typically paid millions of dollars a year and are the elite of the firm. Every three years, they vote to elect the firm’s global managing partner. One of them, Kevin Sneader, who led McKinsey when details of its work with Purdue first became public, was among at least 39 people who sent character references about Mr. Elling to the judge in the case. Mr. Sneader, now president of Goldman Sachs in Asia, wrote that Mr. Elling was “generous; knowledgeable; well traveled; insightful.”
Mr. Elling was sentenced at the federal courthouse in Abingdon, a town in Appalachia, which was devastated by the opioid crisis. A prosecutor in the case, Randy Ramseyer, had spearheaded an investigation into Purdue that in 2007 secured guilty pleas from the drugmaker and three of its executives for misleading doctors, patients and regulators about the risks of OxyContin. Prosecutors had asked the judge to sentence Mr. Elling to 12 months in prison, double the time he is now meant to serve, and to three years of supervised release.
“This is a rare case: a well-educated senior partner at one of the world’s foremost consulting companies was caught destroying documents relating to the investigation of OxyContin, a powerful opioid narcotic drug, against the tragic backdrop of the opioid crisis,” prosecutors wrote in a memo signed by Mr. Ramseyer.
Mr. Elling is not the only McKinsey senior partner to have pleaded guilty to federal crimes in the past year. Vikas Sagar, who once worked for the firm in South Africa, pleaded guilty to conspiring to violate an anticorruption law, according to court documents unsealed in December. He is awaiting sentencing.
Michael Forsythe a reporter on the investigations team at The Times, based in New York. He has written extensively about, and from, China.
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