How McKinsey reimagines Capitalism
In the New York Times yesterday Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe describe how McKinsey have helped raise the stature of authoritarian governments and one of the examples they give is Ukraine:
In Ukraine, McKinsey and Paul Manafort — President Trump’s campaign chairman, later convicted of financial fraud — were paid by the same oligarch to help burnish the image of a disgraced presidential candidate, Viktor F. Yanukovych, recasting him as a reformer.
Once in office, Mr. Yanukovych rebuffed the West, sided with Russia and fled the country, accused of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars. The events set off years of chaos in Ukraine and an international standoff with the Kremlin.
This much I knew. We were in Ukraine from 2004 and in 2007 published our strategy plan to apply business to resolve a broad range of social problems. In 2013 before violent conflict came to the streets. I shared our story of Re-Imagining Capitalism with McKinsey and the Long Term Capitalism initiative. I described how it began in 1996 with a question of how the economy could better serve humanity, leading to our ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine.
In 2016 with a book titled Reimagining Capitalism, McKinsey were telling us how capitalism can be reimagined to better serve society.
We’s been deeply involved as a business for social purpose in Ukraine when speaking our about corruption in institutional childcare. In our founder’s article on Death Camps , For Children he’d pulled no punches when describing the motivation of Ukraine’s oligarchs:
“Excuses won’t work, particularly in light of a handful of oligarchs in Ukraine having been allowed to loot Ukraine’s economy for tens of billions of dollars. I point specifically to Akhmetov, Pinchuk, Poroshenko, and Kuchma, and this is certainly not an exhaustive list. These people can single-handedly finance 100% of all that will ever be needed to save Ukraine’s orphans. None of them evidently bother to think past their bank accounts, and seem to have at least tacit blessings at this point from the new regime to keep their loot while no one wants to consider Ukraine’s death camps, and the widespread poverty that produced them..”
With his subsequent overview of efforts in Ukraine, Terry Hallman wrote of the threat from McKinsey’s client who had announced plans to hire Western experts to create a ‘Marshall Plan’ for Ukraine:
“As the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Plan came around in June 2007, noise was emerging within Ukraine of a certain political boss preparing a Marshall Plan for Ukraine. This person was a reputed mob boss — exactly the sort of entity that the original Marshall Plan meant to oppose. It seemed most likely that whatever he came up with would be self-serving, hijacking the label ‘Marshall Plan’ and turning the whole notion on its head. I reviewed the original Marshall Plan and realized that what I had written was, in fact, the definition and spirit of the original Marshall Plan. Thus, in June 2007, I appended the original title with “A Marshall Plan for Ukraine.” After some discussion among trusted colleagues over timing, I published an abbreviated version of the paper in two parts in August 2007 in the ‘analytics’ section of the Ukrainian news journal for-ua.com.”
Former PM Yulia Tymoshenko spoke about it too:
Not so a long ago Rinat Akhmetov threatened to hire the clever American experts (1) and write for Ukraine the plan of development on the nearest 20–30 years in a prospect, Yulia Tymoshenko press service reported.
According to plan (read by myself in the internet), it must have been, at least, “Marshall plan for Ukraine”. However nobody knows either Marshalls are finished there, behind the ocean or something worse has happened. But as a result instead of Marshall plan we received the “proFFesor’s plan”(2) as usual.
I analyze stage-by-stage implementation of “Marshall plan” from Akhmetov (3) and become convinced that it was written, probably, by domestic specialists (“marshalls” or generals from SCM-group), because it will never occur to any average manafort(4) to put a first issue of such plan a task to “steal “Dniproenergo” at a state”.
It would be several years before the Sunday Times and Kyiv Post published the story of Torez orphanage, which had been the focus of the Death Camps series. In the article, Akhmetov is identified as the oligarch who will resolve the problem over the next 5 years.
“We are all guilty of inaction. The violation of human rights in Ukraine is one of the pressing issues of our day. The suppression of freedom of speech, the control of the right of assembly, the oppressive use of the tax police and the blatant banditry of the road all pale into insignificance when compared to the wanton starvation of disabled children by those whom the state has empowered to protect them. “
“This story will reverberate right around the world and so it should. Ukraine will be judged not by the actions of this cruel few but on how the case is now handled by the authorities. However, we must also look to ourselves for it is no longer acceptable to look the other way.
The Ukrainian maxim: “I saw nothing, my home is on the other side of the village” has no place in the modern world. If by our deliberate blindness, children are allowed to suffer such depravities then, by our inaction, we are all guilty.”
When Terry Hallman died in 2011, he was commended by a friend at Maidan who spoke to him on his last evening, who wrote: ‘The author of breakthrough report ‘’Death Camps for Children’ suddely died of grave disease. On his death bed he spoke only of these unfortunate children and his hopes that his work would be continued’
