Unaccountable 00048: The consultants revolving door — BCG welcomes Bain’s boys

The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is one of the Big Three management consultancies, along with McKinsey and Bain. Founded in 1963, it has operations across 90 cities in 50 countries, including a large office in South Africa. In a previous instalment in the Unaccountable series, Open Secrets discussed the firm’s controversial work and relationship with Isabel dos Santos – daughter of former president Eduardo José dos Santos, who ruled Angola for 38 years – during her time as director of Sonangol, Angola’s state-owned oil entity. 

BCG was brought on to “modernise” the state entity, but instead it benefitted from systemic corruption at the company, leaving Sonangol with just $300 in its bank account while receiving millions of dollars in fees. Responding to the original investigation by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), BCG insisted that it had “adequately reviewed the payment structures and contracts… to avoid corruption and other risks”.

Despite this, BCG has positioned itself as a leader on climate-related consulting around the world and cemented itself as a key partner in South Africa’s energy space, working on numerous projects linked to South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET). Ironically, it has arguably been so successful at doing this in South Africa precisely because its major competitors were deeply complicit in State Capture. As a result of that complicity, Bain was banned from public sector contracts in South Africa and later shut down its operation in the country as a result. McKinsey was criminally charged due to its role in State Capture at Transnet until a recent settlement with the US Department of Justice and South African authorities.

Yet, though BCG appears to have benefitted from the scandals of its competitors, several former members of the Bain team that worked on the South African Revenue Service (SARS) project during State Capture moved to BCG within a short period of time after the full extent of Bain’s role in the attack on SARS was revealed. 

Bain and the gutting of the tax authority

In Unaccountable 00021 we told the story of Bain & Company’s role in the attack on SARS during the height of State Capture. Bain, known for its “notoriously secretive modus operandi”, sank its teeth into SARS in 2013, through a partnership with a company called Ambrobrite, owned by politically connected elites Mandla KaNozulu and Dumakude Ndlovu, who had a close relationship with former president Jacob Zuma. Through its relationship with Ambrobrite, Bain was able to secure lucrative state contracts and was given inside knowledge on important changes that were planned at state institutions before these changes occurred. 

Bain was at the centre of destructive structural changes at SARS, most notably through the role it played in the disastrous appointment of Tom Moyane as SARS commissioner after Moyane was introduced to the head of Bain, Vittorio Massone. The Zondo Commission of Inquiry into State Capture confirmed that Bain had worked “hand in hand [with the State Capture network] to systematically and deliberately dismantle” SARS. This in turn undermined revenue collection, with knock-on effects on vital social spending on key services. 

The damning findings of the Nugent Commission of Inquiry into SARS in 2018, supported by the Zondo Commission’s findings regarding the revenue service in 2022, made Bain’s complicity clear. This led the National Treasury to ban Bain from any public contracts for 10 years, in September 2022, on the basis that the firm had been complicit in “corrupt and fraudulent practices”. In 2025, Bain closed its offices in South Africa.

The grass is greener at BCG

As these findings were emerging, several senior Bain officials involved in the SARS work were jumping ship and were being picked up by a BCG lifeboat. In March 2023, former Bain employee turned whistle-blower Athol Williams took to social media to voice his frustration about how individuals at Bain who had worked on the SARS project had escaped accountability. He said: “Wondered what happened to the consultants who restructured @sarstax ? They’re still in South Africa but have regrouped under @BCG. Peter Clearkin, Alexis Bour, Warren Chetty, now Partners at BCG, were among the longest serving senior consultants with Tom Moyane.”

In 2024, a former BCG employee, who wished to remain anonymous, confirmed to Open Secrets that Bour, Chetty, and Clearkin joined BCG in relatively quick succession. 

Evidence presented at the Nugent Commission, in 2018, revealed that Bour, along with Stephane Timpano, another partner at Bain, had prepared the “first 100 days” document and presented it in a meeting with Massone and Moyane. This document set out the changes that Moyane was to make at SARS, but it was authored months before Zuma made the announcement about Moyane’s appointment, showing Bain’s insider knowledge of Zuma’s plans for SARS.

Bour had also continued correspondence with Moyane throughout 2014 and was evidently responsible for work that Bain was doing for SARS during this time. Despite his involvement in the process that gutted SARS, Bour walked away unscathed and set up shop at BCG in 2018. He is currently a managing director and partner, working primarily in the “mining, chemicals, and energy” sectors, among others. 

Clearkin was another figure who emerged at this time as one of the senior members of the team at Bain involved in the work of restructuring SARS. In 2022, the Helen Suzman Foundation submitted a memorandum on Bain’s involvement in the capture of SARS to the US Department of Justice, in which it outlined Clearkin’s involvement in this work, including evidence that he was part of email correspondence with then CEO Massone discussing how new work for SARS could only be done by bypassing competitive tender processes. Since joining BCG in 2020, Clearkin too is a managing director and partner and is the firm’s global lead for mining.

Both Williams and the anonymous former BCG employee also reference Chetty as having worked on the SARS project while at Bain. Like Clearkin, Chetty moved, in 2020, to BCG, where he has focused predominantly on transactions and financial institutions and was involved most recently in BCG’s work on Africa’s climate financing. 

Open Secrets wrote to Bour, Chetty and Clearkin with detailed questions about their work on the SARS project, and to BCG regarding their knowledge of this work and its process to hire these individuals.

BCG indicated that it would send a response on behalf of the firm and the individual partners. When it did, the response did not answer the questions individually but instead provided the following broad reply: “As with all of our work, BCG is committed to the highest standards of ethics and business conduct, and we apply rigorous confidentiality measures and conflict-of-interest protocols in our engagements. Furthermore, BCG follows a rigorous vetting process when hiring new colleagues to ensure there are no factors that would preclude their onboarding. We adhere to procurement policies and regulatory requirements, and BCG maintains strict confidentiality agreements with all our clients – both in the private and public sectors. As such, we are unable to provide details on individual clients or specific project work.” 

BCG corners climate consulting market

The soft landing for these consultants, implicated in a project that did significant damage to SARS and thus the public, raises serious questions about corporate accountability and consequences for work done in the context of consulting relationships. It also raises questions about BCG’s ethos as it plays an increasingly prominent role in relation to South Africa’s Just Energy Transition (JET).

BCG is a recipient of Just Energy Transition Partnership (JETP) grant funds – money from international donors meant to assist South Africa’s energy transition – and is working on projects that fundamentally impact the public interest. For example, from January 2022 to December 2023, BCG was the implementing entity for the refinement of the Eskom JET Office strategy, to decommission coal plants. This was in partnership with Eskom and the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet, for just over R11.6-million. 

Between July 2023 and March 2025, BCG was awarded an R18.6-million contract to conduct “early-stage pipeline scoping” in Mpumalanga for JETP small and medium enterprise (SME) investment, which entails mobilising private investment for SMEs. 

When asked about its work on South Africa’s Just Energy Transition, BCG responded that: “As is already a matter of public record, our various efforts with multi-stakeholder coalitions (e.g. NBI, Busa, the Energy Council of South Africa) have involved many contributors from many different organisations as part of transparent consultation processes, with BCG providing analytical and technical modelling support. We are proud of our contribution in South Africa’s JET.”

BCG’s work that affects South Africa extends beyond these projects to the work it does with South Africa’s largest corporations. One of these relationships is with Standard Bank.

One of the consultants that made the move from Bain to BCG, Warren Chetty, allegedly plays a role in managing one of BCG’s largest and most important corporate accounts, Standard Bank. BCG has another strong connection with Standard Bank, which might explain the close relationship: Adam Ikdal joined the bank as chief of strategy in February 2022, after a 25-year career at BCG, where he had risen to managing partner. 

Standard Bank confirmed in writing to Open Secrets that it has contracted BCG to do work for seven years, since 2018. It stressed that this decision was made prior to Ikdal joining the company and that he thus had no influence on it. Standard Bank further noted that it has a “stringent and fair procurement process for third parties” but declined to respond regarding which BCG consultants oversee this relationship. 

The relationship is noteworthy because Standard Bank is no stranger to controversy in the climate space. The bank announced, in June 2024, that it would finance the $5-billion East African Crude Oil Pipeline project (EACOP) despite massive criticism. French fossil fuel giant TotalEnergies, in partnership with the China National Offshore Oil Corporation, and Tanzanian and Ugandan state-owned oil companies, plans on constructing a pipeline that will transport crude oil from Uganda to Tanzania. 

Thousands of people have been displaced to accommodate the pipeline, and there has been a police crackdown on human rights defenders and those who oppose the construction of the pipeline. The environmental damage to wildlife, forests and water will probably be catastrophic.

We asked Standard Bank about its role in EACOP, and it insisted that “the project has been subject to comprehensive social and environmental risk assessments by independent consultants, and will be subject to ongoing reporting and monitoring, thereby ensuring responsible environmental practices”.

BCG’s global petro-paymasters

The concerns are heightened due to the systemic conflicts of interest BCG face – like most major consulting firms – in consulting for major fossil fuel firms while advising other clients on climate change. BCG made close to $1.1-billion from climate consulting in 2021, and climate consulting may account for almost a third of its sales by 2027. In 2021, BCG’s appointment as the consulting partner for COP26 immediately raised eyebrows in the UK as BCG also worked for “19 of the world’s 25 biggest oil companies” at the time. 

BCG’s relationship with petrostate Saudi Arabia has also led to the firm being accused of greenwashing. BCG has been contracted for lucrative consulting work on the controversial $500-billion project to build the megacity of Neom, launched by MBS in 2017. It is marketed as a project that will launch Saudi Arabia as a sustainable country on the cutting edge of renewable energy but has been mired in allegations of serious human rights abuses against local communities being displaced to make way for the project. 

In May 2023, BCG named Saudi Aramco, the country’s state-owned oil company, one of its 50 most innovative companies of 2023, based on its criteria of “new products and exploring adjacent business models”. A month later, the United Nations Working Group on Human Rights and Transnational Corporations issued Aramco and the financial institutions backing it with a warning for their violation of climate-related human rights. BCG also ranked other mega-polluters and fossil fuel giants Shell and ExxonMobil among its top 50 innovative companies, despite these companies making record profits from continued fossil fuel exploration in 2023. 

Despite BCG’s clear conflicts of interest, it has continued to play a key part in global climate negotiations. Following its role as partner for COP26, the firm also played a role at the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP27) in the following year, before being chosen as the “Principal Strategy and Action Partner” for the 28th United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP28), in 2023, in the petrostate of the United Arab Emirates. COP28 also saw a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists present (2,456), accounting for nearly 3% of total attendance. 

Stopping the consulting merry-go-round 

The revolving door is a common feature across management consultancies, with consultants moving between the firms and oftentimes avoiding accountability for wrongdoing. This is exactly what happened at Bain and BCG. 

The story of how these three senior consultants who worked closely on Bain’s project to destroy SARS seamlessly transitioned to BCG, into leadership positions there, raises serious concerns. Why did BCG hire them, given their most recent track record and implication in state capture at SARS, and what does this say about BCG’s views on accountability for corruption and State Capture? 

It also raises more fundamental questions about the extent to which private consulting firms have infiltrated all parts of our states and politics, and the need for more effective regulation of those who are implicated in wrongdoing that has serious public consequences. DM

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Read more profiles from the Unaccountable series here.