McKinsey & Co. has been a top government consultant since 2016 in Puerto Rico, helping the U.S. territory’s financial overseers manage its spending. In that time, corporate clients of the consulting firm have won tens of billions of dollars of government business, new disclosures show, the Wall Street Journal reported. Since McKinsey began its work for Puerto Rico’s financial-oversight board, the firm has helped the board review and evaluate contracts with companies that are also McKinsey’s consulting clients, according to disclosures it filed in federal court last month and other public documents. McKinsey clients include some of the largest fuel suppliers to Puerto Rico, an infrastructure company with a major role in operating the territory’s electrical grid and contractors that support its public-health system. A McKinsey spokesman said that the firm served these clients on unrelated matters and that its work for them hasn’t conflicted with its work for the oversight board. Hundreds of other companies with financial interests in Puerto Rico also have ongoing ties to McKinsey, according to the firm’s disclosures and other court records and public documents. Most of these client relationships weren’t formally disclosed until last month, when a new federal law required McKinsey and other professional advisers to detail any ties to clients with creditor claims or other interests in Puerto Rico. The disclosures were required under the Puerto Rico Recovery Accuracy in Disclosures Act, a transparency law written in 2018 after some lawmakers raised concerns that the firm had undisclosed conflicts of interest in its work for the oversight board, which McKinsey has denied.
