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A former senior partner at McKinsey has been sentenced to six months in prison for removing documents about the work of the Opioid manufacturer Purdue Pharma consultancy.
Martin Elling argued in January guilty of a single indictment for obstruction of justice and admitted that he deleted more than 100 computer files with regard to his work for Purdue after officers of Justice started investigating the role of the drug maker in an epidemic of opioid addiction that destroyed the US.
Elling was in a team of McKinsey -Consultants who advised Purdue, the maker of Oxycontin, on how the sale of the painkiller in ‘Turbolar’. Purdue had accepted McKinsey in 2013 to breathe new life into the sale of the painkiller, and Elling helped in winning the company and Leiden the team that devised the strategy, in which aggressive marketing was involved in doctors who virtually prescribed the medicine, according to federal prosecutors.
In August 2018, after news items that American authorities examined the company, Elling sent an e-mail a task list with the subject line “When Home” with the item “Remove Old Pur [Purdue Pharma] Laptop documents ”, according to the court applications.
A forensic analysis showed that a folder named “Purdue” disappeared together with more than 100 documents. The prosecutors said the deletions were intended to protect evidence about the role of him and McKinsey in the American public health crisis resulting from opioid addiction, which has led to nearly 1 million killing since the turn of the century.
McKinsey has paid around $ 1.6 billion to arrange a series of legal claims that her work has contributed to opioid manufacturers to the addiction crisis, including a deferred prosecution agreement of $ 650 million with the US Department of Justice in December. The company said that his opioid work was a source of “in -depth regret” and that it has since renewed risk management processes.
On Thursday, Elling was sentenced to six months in prison plus 1000 hours of community service for two years of guided release, according to a spokesperson for his lawyers.
“Martin fully accepts the responsibility for his behavior, for which he regrets enormously,” said his legal team in a statement. “He plans to spend the rest of his life trying to regain the trust of those he disappointed with his behavior.”
Public prosecutors had argued for a prison sentence of 12 months, “to send a message to white borders defendants that they are not above the law and prevent others from avoiding responsibility by destroying evidence”.
The lawyer Van Elling, Thomas Bondurant, wrote in a submission prior to the conviction that his client “sincerely regrets his actions, he understands their seriousness and he accepts their consequences”, and that he “had already paid a big price for his actions”.
Elling was dismissed by McKinsey in 2021 after the disclosure of an internal e -mail in which Elling was discussed that documents delete. Bondurant said that a prison sentence would mean that Elling could not return to Thailand, where he has been living since 2019.
Some of the oldest former managers of the company weighed as character witnesses, including former managing partner Kevin Sneader, and Elling’s lawyers called his actions ‘an extraordinary aberration’ in a 30-year McKinsey career.
Sneader, who led McKinsey as his global managing partner from 2018 to 2021 and is now a director of Goldman Sachs, called Elling “generous; expert; well traveled; insightful” in a character reference that was submitted to judge Robert Ballou of the American district court for the western district of Virginia.
“Martin was seen as a really appreciated coach for 100s colleagues who benefited from his generosity of time, although there were many more financially rewarding ways in which he could have spent the countless hours that he devoted himself to help others succeed,” Sneader wrote.
Elling also attracted character references by Michael Silber, the former financial officer of McKinsey, and Katy George, the former Chief People officer who is now at Microsoft, under 39 written submissions prior to the hearing.