The Sunday Times reports this morning that:
An international consulting firm won or managed foreign aid contracts worth more than £25m at the Department for International Development (DfID) at the same time as it was paid millions of pounds to scrutinise the department's spending.
KPMG led a consortium that received £10m in the four years to July 2015 to ensure that UK overseas aid was spent effectively.
As they explain:
The Independent Commission for Aid Impact (ICAI), the body that scrutinises the UK's foreign aid, appointed KPMG as the leader of a consortium paid £10m between May 2011 and July 2015 to help it hold the DfID to account. KPMG received a large share of the fee.
The ICAI and the DfID said measures were in place when KPMG won the contract to ensure there was no conflict of interest.
I note the reassurance, but this does not pass a smell test.
Again.
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Or to use a Private Eye-ism, ‘They would say that wouldn’t they.’ Like you I’m deeply skeptical of such assurances that there are no conflicts of interest, not least because I routinely see references to examples in the work of my postgrad students (the majority of whom come from a wide range of public and private sector organisations); and in 2010 and 2011 heard direct from a range of civil servants I was teaching at the time of examples. We can be assured that things have got far more compromised ever since as both this and the previous government pursue an ideological obsession with advancing the corporate capture of the state.
As well as the obvious conflict of interest within the various government contracts undertaken by each major consultancy/accounting/tax/audit firm, there is the even more pernicious conflict of interest between their work with government and their usually much larger work with clients in the major financial and corporate sectors.
No Chinese Wall ever invented will prevent naked greed and self interest from slipping through at every possible opportunity.
Talk about an incestuous vipers nest, I’m surprised some of their partners haven’t started to grow scales and venomous fangs while hissing and slithering their way down the corridors of power each day!