The renowned American consultancy Boston Consulting Group was discredited after revelations about involvement in a controversial aid project in the Gaza Strip. The British newspaper reports this Financial Times Friday based on own research. BCG not only participated in the establishment of an American-Israeli aid organization, but also made calculations for scenarios in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians would leave Gaza.
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What’s going on?
The Boston Consulting Group (BCG) consultancy worked for months on a cost calculation for the redesign of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip. The agency also signed a million contract to help set up the controversial American-Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF).
According to a scenario that BCG worked out in an internal model, more than five hundred thousand inhabitants of Gaza could leave the area with a so -called ‘relocation package’ of 9,000 dollars (around 7,642 euros) per person – a total of around 5 billion dollars. BCG speaks of ‘voluntary resettlement’, but the large -scale relocation of population groups under force or need is a form of ethnic cleansing.
The work on GHF and a committed security company lasted seven months and yielded BCG more than 4 million dollars, according to anonymous sources within the company to the Financial Times. According to the newspaper, the role of BCG was considerably larger than the company itself has recognized so far.
BCG has since distanced himself from the project. In a statement, BCG reports that an American team led by two managing directors/partners in October 2024 to set up the aid organization. Their activities were ‘unauthorized’. BCG wants to “learn and guarantee that it doesn’t happen again”. An external law firm investigates the state of affairs.
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Why is the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation controversial?
The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is a help project supported by the US and Israel that has been active in Gaza since May. The four distribution points of GHF are monitored by Israeli soldiers and American private security guards. Since its foundation, according to health authorities and UN sources, more than five hundred Palestinians have died while they tried to get food at these points; Thousands of others were injured.
More than one hundred and thirty NGOs, including Amnesty International, Save the Children and Oxfam, demand the closure of GHF in a joint statement. The UN calls the project a “military instrument” that violates fundamental humanitarian principles.
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What is Boston Consulting Group?
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) is one of the most influential strategic consultancy firms in the world and, together with McKinsey & Company and Bain & Company, forms the so -called ‘Big Three’. The American company was founded in 1963 and grew into a dominant player in international management advice. BCG has more than 36,000 employees, is active in 45 countries and achieved a turnover of around 12 billion dollars (more than 10 billion euros) in 2024.
BCG gained fame as a pioneer in business strategy. Founder Bruce Henderson introduced the model of the ‘Growth Share Matrix’ in the 1960s, everyone who once studied a marketing book has come across the BCG matrix. Consultants came up with this schedule with four areas to help companies decide how to distribute the money over activities, in which business activities are subdivided into categories such as ‘Cash Cow’ and ‘Question Mark’.
Nowadays BCG advises governments, companies and international organizations in areas such as digital transformation, mergers, sustainability and geopolitical risks. In many cases, consultants temporarily take on a key role within an organization: they conduct research, count scenarios or help set up new structures, such as GHF in Gaza.
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Why do governments hire consultancy firms like BCG?
Governments are increasingly appealing to external consultants, partly because they have cut away internal expertise. This makes ministries dependent on commercial parties such as BCG, Deloitte and McKinsey, even for fundamental policy.
The Italian-American professor Mariana Mazzucato warns in her book The Big Con for the dependence on the governments of consultants. She spoke earlier in NRC of ‘hollowed -out, risky and infantilized’ states that have divested fundamental policy knowledge – and therefore now hire structurally external agencies for tasks that were once performed. According to the Financial Times, governments nevertheless consciously opt for consultancy firms, because they would have ‘a greater reach’ than their own official service, which often consists of only a few dozen employees.
Consultants are also influential behind the scenes of politics. Well -known Dutch administrators such as Wopke Hoekstra (CDA, former finance minister and now European Commissioner) and Wiebe Draijer (former CEO of Rabobank) started their career at McKinsey.
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Have it been discredited earlier?
Yes, consultancy firms have been the subject of controversy more often. In 2024, for example, BCG admitted that employees at the Lisbona office had paid bribes to win assignments in Angola. The company reported this to the US Department of Justice and settled $ 14.4 million.
Another well -known example is McKinsey, which played a central role in the American opioid crisis. The agency advised pharmaceutical companies – including Purdue Pharma, the producer of OxyContin – on how to increase the sale of addictive painkillers. Those strategies contributed to a public health crisis that killed hundreds of thousands of Americans. McKinsey finally settled for more than 800 million dollars (around 679 million euros) with American authorities.
In addition, the agency was discredited because it included climate policy in Australia, while at the same time it had dozens of polluting companies in the oil and mining sector as a customer. In the United Kingdom, KPMG consultants worked on tax rules, with which they later advertised.