The headquarters of Emmanuel Macron’s party and the consulting firm McKinsey in Paris were searched by the Justice this Tuesday (13), informs the newspaper Le Parisien.
The operations take place within the framework of two investigations opened at the end of October. One of them investigates possible irregularities in the accounting of Macron’s campaigns for the Presidency of France in 2022 and 2017. The other investigates the relations between the party and McKinsey which, according to a recent investigation conducted by the French Senate, would have been favored in public tenders in both mandates of the current president.
The suspicion is that employees of the American company worked in the victorious campaigns without their names being declared on the taxes. In exchange, McKinsey would have been favored by competing in a series of bids.
The Senate report even claimed that an advantageous tax deal has allowed McKinsey France to pay no taxes for the last ten years, despite posting high profits in the country. And it indicated that State spending on private consultancy services more than doubled between 2018 and 2021, totaling expenditures of more than €1 billion.
Macron has denied any wrongdoing in his campaigns and said he was not afraid of scrutiny when questioned recently. His party, Renaissance, told the French press that it was “normal for the judiciary to carry out free and independent investigations to clarify the matter” and added that it was at the disposal of the authorities.
Finally, McKinsey assured that it intends to “fully cooperate” with the investigations. According to Le Parisien, the company had defended itself on a previous occasion by claiming to represent only “1% of public administration spending on consultancy”, a fact that would appear in the Senate report.
This is the second time in less than six months that the French subsidiary McKinsey has been the target of a search. In May, French customs officers searched the company’s headquarters as part of an investigation into suspected money laundering and tax fraud.
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