McKinsey and the Macron campaigns: four years of investigation, and silence as the only answer
The suspected irregular financing of Emmanuel Macron’s campaigns by McKinsey consultants is not a footnote. It is potentially one of the heaviest political-financial suspicions in the history of the Fifth Republic: two presidential campaigns implicated, hundreds of millions of euros in public contracts as backdrop, and a judicial investigation open since October 2022 that has produced no visible resolution. Let’s lay out the facts coldly, carefully separating what is established from what remains suspected. That boundary is precisely what those in power would like to see blurred, and precisely what makes this affair so unsettling.
What the Senate established
Everything starts with the Senate inquiry committee’s report of March 17, 2022, the one that described a “tentacular phenomenon.” Two figures in it are documented, not alleged, documented. First figure: the French state’s consulting expenditures more than doubled over Macron’s first term, exceeding one billion euros in 2021 alone. Second figure: McKinsey, whose French revenue reached 329 million euros in 2020 with roughly 600 employees in the country, paid zero corporate income tax in France between 2011 and 2020. Zero euros, ten years running, thanks to transfer pricing payments to the Delaware parent company that reduce the French taxable result to nothing.
Let’s be clear right away, because intellectual honesty demands it: this arrangement is probably legal. Matthieu Aron, author of Les Infiltrés, the reference book on France’s consulting industry, acknowledges as much himself. Which is exactly what should worry us most. A tax system that squeezes the baker in Clermont-Ferrand from his first euro but lets a multinational consulting firm bill the French state for ten years without contributing a cent to its budget does not have a fraud problem. It has a design problem. I have described elsewhere this France of estates where the fiscal shakedown always hits the same people: here is its mirror image, the ones it never hits.
Between 2018 and 2021, McKinsey landed some forty assignments for the French state, worth between 28 and 50 million euros in total: pension reform, housing subsidies, unemployment insurance, vaccine strategy. The firm that pays no tax in France advises the French state on how to reform what that tax is supposed to fund. One has to admire the elegance of the loop.
What the courts are investigating
The heart of the suspicion is the 2017 campaign, and now the years leading up to it. The MacronLeaks showed that about ten McKinsey consultants worked on candidate Macron’s platform: strategy meetings, memos, prep work, in direct contact with his inner circle of the time (Alexis Kohler, Julien Denormandie, Ismaël Emelien). Karim Tadjeddine, senior partner and head of McKinsey France’s public sector practice, appears in those exchanges using his McKinsey work email, which he characterized before the Senate as a mistake. No corresponding invoice appears anywhere in the campaign accounts, as Le Monde verified.
The entire legal question rests on one distinction. If those consultants worked as individuals, as volunteers, on their own time, that is perfectly legal political activism. If, on the other hand, their work amounted to a service provided by McKinsey the company, even free of charge, then it constitutes an in-kind benefit from a corporation to a candidate, which French electoral law flatly prohibits. In that second case, and in that second case only, we would be talking about illegal campaign financing. McKinsey’s defense pleads individual volunteering. The investigating judges are trying to establish the opposite. I will simply note that a dozen volunteers from the same firm, coordinating with the candidate’s innermost circle, some of them using their corporate email, adds up to a great deal of remarkably synchronized free time.
The judicial machinery did get moving, belatedly but genuinely. On March 31, 2022, the National Financial Prosecutor’s Office (PNF, France’s white-collar crime unit) opened a preliminary inquiry into aggravated laundering of aggravated tax fraud, targeting the firm’s tax arrangement. Six months later, in October 2022, came two formal judicial investigations, the French procedure that places a case in the hands of independent investigating magistrates. One concerns improper campaign accounting, covering how consulting firms intervened in the 2017 and 2022 campaigns, since broadened to the years 2015 and 2016, when Macron was economy minister and McKinsey had allegedly already provided unpaid services to the Finance Ministry, according to documents published by Mediapart. The other concerns favoritism in the awarding of public contracts, with Judge Tournaire seeking to determine whether the 36 orders McKinsey obtained between January 2021 and June 2022, worth more than 24 million euros, complied with competitive bidding rules.
The searches have followed one another: McKinsey’s headquarters, the homes of current and former executives, the Health Ministry, the offices of Renaissance (Macron’s party) and its campaign finance association. The most recent, on November 6, 2025, once again at McKinsey, was ordered by Judge Serge Tournaire. The name deserves a pause: Tournaire is the magistrate who handled the Fillon case and the Libyan financing case against Sarkozy. The man knows the genre, and he has proven elsewhere that he knows how to move fast. It is now 2026, and the investigation goes on.
Here again, let’s walk the ridgeline. Emmanuel Macron has not personally been placed under formal investigation. And the Paris prosecutor’s office has dropped the perjury proceedings against Karim Tadjeddine over his Senate testimony, in which he had declared under oath, “let me say it plainly: we pay corporate income tax in France,” while the Senate report established ten years of zero payments. That dismissal is worth dwelling on: lying under oath to a parliamentary inquiry committee, or at the very least making statements the facts flatly contradict, does not seem to carry much risk in our Republic.
Two speeds, one justice system
This is where the affair stops being a McKinsey affair and becomes a justice affair. Compare two timelines.
On January 25, 2017, the investigative weekly Le Canard enchaîné published its revelations about Penelope Fillon’s employment as her husband’s parliamentary aide. The National Financial Prosecutor’s Office opened a preliminary inquiry that very day. The couple was questioned five days later. François Fillon, then the conservative frontrunner for president, was formally indicted on March 14, 2017, seven weeks after the first article, in the middle of a presidential campaign, over damages measured in hundreds of thousands of euros. The judicial machine demonstrated that day that it could move fast when it wanted to.
On the other side: suspicions involving two presidential campaigns, alleged free services from a multinational, tens of millions of euros in public contracts of questioned regularity. A preliminary inquiry in March 2022, formal judicial investigations in October 2022, and since then, four years of repeated searches without a single central figure indicted, without referral to trial, without dismissal, without anything. The investigation is not buried; it is suspended in a limbo that judges no one and clears no one.
I am not claiming the two cases are legally identical. One involved simple facts documented by pay stubs; the other requires drawing the line between individual volunteering and corporate services, which is harder. But the gap in tempo has grown too wide to be explained by complexity alone. When the courts can find a prison cell for Sarkozy and immediate ineligibility for Marine Le Pen, but four years of patience for the party in power, the ordinary citizen draws the conclusion the system should fear most: that judicial speed is a political variable.
The immediate news cycle offers a striking test bench. On July 7, the Paris court of appeals hands down its ruling on Marine Le Pen in the European parliamentary assistants case. At trial, in March 2025, she was sentenced to five years of ineligibility with immediate effect notwithstanding appeal, that is, political elimination applied before her appeals were even exhausted. Meanwhile, the investigation targeting Jean-Luc Mélenchon in a case of the same nature was closed on May 26, 2026, after eight years, without a single indictment. The detail that induces vertigo: both proceedings descend from the same initial 2017 complaints, filed by MEP Sophie Montel, which named elected officials from several parties. One original denunciation, three clocks: immediate enforcement for one, quiet extinction after eight years for another, perpetual suspension for the party in power. I am not claiming these cases are equivalent on the merits; each has its own facts and its own evidence, and I make no prediction about what the appeals court will say tomorrow. What I observe is that judicial tempo obeys no rule a citizen can read. And an unreadable judicial clock is a manipulable one, and a manipulable clock is a political resource.
Selective legibility, once again
I have argued elsewhere that real power is measured by what you are allowed not to show. The taxpayer is transparent down to the last cent; McKinsey repatriates its results to Delaware. Candidate Fillon was X-rayed in seven weeks; candidate Macron’s campaigns have been under investigation for four years behind a secrecy of judicial proceedings that, as I have documented, serves the institution far more than the citizen. This asymmetry of legibility is not a malfunction of the system. It is one of its structural properties, the same one I described in the government’s closed circle.
And there is a deeper irony, one the Senate report brushes against without naming. A state that claims to plan pensions, housing, unemployment insurance, and the vaccination of 67 million people had to outsource its own thinking to an American firm. The planner’s claimed omniscience is purchased in billed services, or worse, in donated ones. Hayek would say this is the fate of every pretension to centralized knowledge: it ends up renting from outside what it claimed to possess. That the landlord pays no taxes and helped the tenant get elected is merely the finishing touch.
The clock of Article 67
There remains one piece of data almost no one mentions, and it changes how the calendar reads. Article 67 of the French Constitution shields the sitting president: he can be neither prosecuted nor compelled to testify during his term, and all statutes of limitations are suspended. That immunity lapses one month after the term ends, in June 2027. At its current pace, the investigation will in all likelihood still be open on that date, and its extension to the years 2015 and 2016 targets precisely the Finance Ministry period, facts predating the election, when Emmanuel Macron was acting as a minister.
The slowness I am denouncing thus carries an ironic reversal: it runs the case out to the exact moment when the former president becomes an ordinary citizen before the law again. You can read that as the prudence of judges biding their time, or as the sheer complexity of the file. But you must above all read its political consequence: whoever controls the Justice Ministry and the prosecutors’ offices in the summer of 2027 will inherit considerable leverage over a former head of state. A hostile successor won’t even need to weaponize anything; simply declining to apply the brakes will suffice. An heir to Macronism, on the other hand, will have every interest in perpetual bogging-down. Seen from this angle, the 2027 presidential election will also be, quietly, an election about the judicial fate of the previous one.
What we should demand
I am not demanding a conviction. I am not a judge, and the investigation will say what it says. I am demanding a resolution. Referral to trial or a reasoned dismissal, but something. Because the current status quo produces the worst of all outcomes: it lets suspicion flourish without ever testing it, it burns through public trust without rendering a verdict, and it plants in the public mind the idea that some cases are investigated precisely so they never have to be judged.
The French are not fools. When justice speeds up for some and slows down for others, that is no longer slowness; it is a signal. And every additional year of silence does not protect the institution that keeps quiet: it feeds the general distrust I described in my autopsy of our political system, the kind that ends up sweeping away the guilty and the innocent in the same wave. Transparency about these campaigns is not a favor we are owed. It is the minimum condition for the word Republic to keep any meaning.