The Minister of Economy and Finance Bruno Le Maire acknowledged this Sunday that there had been “abuses” in the past in the significant use of ministries to consulting firms like McKinsey. He considers this habit now “corrected”. Two investigations have been opened by the courts into the intervention of consulting firms in Emmanuel Macron’s electoral campaigns in 2017 and 2022, to try to find out whether they have not unduly benefited from funding in return for public contracts. .
“I am not commenting on the legal proceedings in progress”, said Bruno Le Maire on France 3. “What matters is what we do to respond to the abuses that have taken place on the use of external consulting firms”, said he added. “I readily admit it, we have gone too far, for years, it’s this government, previous governments, previous majorities. We had probably gotten too used to saying ‘the administration is not able to do this work, we will outsource and ask consulting firms'”.
“This deviation has been corrected”
“I think that there has indeed been a drift and that this drift has been corrected”, in particular by a circular from Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne asking the government to reduce the use of consulting firms by 15%. According to him, Bercy reduced the use of these companies by 34% between the 1st half of 2021 and the 1st half of 2022. “I think it’s the same trend elsewhere”, he said again, about the other ministries. “There have certainly been abuses. We must first rely on its administration, especially when we have an administration of the exceptional quality of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, and reduce the use of consulting firms” .
Asked on BFMTV about these statements by his supervising minister, the Minister Delegate in charge of Public Accounts, Gabriel Attal, for his part mentioned “examples that had actually been given on certain missions that had been carried out and of which we did not really understand the object or what it brought”. Bruno Le Maire ruled out any political trace that this affair could leave, “as long as justice does its job, that we learn the lessons of abuse, I do not believe that this is the subject of major concern for the French”.