PARIS (Reuters) – Searches took place on Tuesday at the French headquarters of the American consulting firm McKinsey as part of the preliminary investigation opened in France into the head of aggravated money laundering and aggravated tax evasion, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF) said. .
The American firm, which also confirmed these searches, claims to have provided “all the information required”.
“The firm is cooperating fully with public authorities, as it always has,” McKinsey said in a statement.
“McKinsey reaffirms that the firm respects the French tax and social rules applicable to it,” he adds.
The PNF announced in early April the opening of a preliminary investigation following a report by the Senate on the use of private consulting firms by French public administrations.
The investigation was entrusted to the Service d’Enquêtes Judiciaires des Finances (SEJF).
In a report made public in mid-March, a Senate inquiry committee highlighted a sharp increase in state spending on consulting services during the five-year term.
She also specifically criticized McKinsey for not paying corporate tax in France for at least 10 years, apparently via a tax optimization practice known as “transfer pricing”.
The Senate subsequently announced that it had taken legal action on suspicion of false testimony during the hearings carried out by this commission of inquiry.
The firm had then declared that it would answer all the questions that the French authorities might ask it and guaranteed to respect French tax law and social law.
(Sudip Kar-Gupta and Tassilo Hummel, French version Marc Angrand and Matthieu Protard, edited by Sophie Louet and Bertrand Boucey)
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