McKinsey & Company, a consulting firm whose conduct in bankruptcy cases has already drawn the attention of two judges, was accused yesterday before a third judge of improperly receiving and concealing payments from a client on the verge of bankruptcy, the New York Times reported. This raised the prospect that the judge overseeing the case could order the return of tens of millions of dollars in fees earned by the consulting company. Signs that something could be wrong at the client company, SunEdison, began to surface after its board hired an outside firm to investigate unrelated employee claims that managers were misstating cash flows. The outside company, FTI Consulting, described an email exchange between a McKinsey consultant and a SunEdison executive, discussing how McKinsey was going to be paid for the work it had already done for the company. Ultimately, there was an agreement that McKinsey would not keep billing SunEdison itself; instead, it would call back its unpaid bills and redirect them to four solar-energy projects that SunEdison had set up for various customers. But there was a problem: McKinsey had not done any work for them. The accusations against McKinsey were contained in a pleading filed yesterday in bankruptcy court in Manhattan by a SunEdison creditor who has made a series of accusations of misconduct against McKinsey. The creditor, the retired turnaround specialist Jay Alix, asserted to Judge Stuart M. Bernstein that McKinsey had used the four projects — whose financing was separate from that of SunEdison and would not be affected by the bankruptcy — to remove any risk of the court finding out that McKinsey pulled money out of the company just before it went bankrupt.
