Prosecutors Take 65 Million Euros From McKinsey, and the Caribbean Should Ask What It Buys From Its Consultants

France and Belgium have seized about 65 million euros from McKinsey, close to the entire sum the firm is alleged to owe in tax. For governments across this region that lean on the same global consultancies to design their debt deals and sell their passports, the lesson is about accountability and value for money, not only tax.

The Financial Times reported in the first week of September 2026 that prosecutors in France and Belgium had seized about 65 million euros from McKinsey and Company, a sum that, according to a joint statement from the office of France's financial prosecutor and prosecutors in Belgium, corresponded to almost all of the tax allegedly owed by the consultancy. We carry the figure and the account as the FT's and the prosecutors', to be confirmed against the primary statements before we would print them as our own. McKinsey has faced scrutiny in France since a 2022 Senate inquiry into the scale of its government contracts and its tax position, and the seizure is the enforcement arm of that long-running story.

A Caribbean business paper runs a European tax seizure for one reason. The same handful of global consultancies that advise Paris advise this region, and they advise it on the decisions that matter most. McKinsey, its peers among the strategy houses, and the big four accounting firms sit inside Caribbean debt restructurings, citizenship by investment program design, energy and gas negotiations, port and airport concessions, and public sector reform. When a small state signs a fiscal plan or a resource deal, a global consultant's model is often underneath it, and the fee for that model is paid in scarce public money.

The story worth taking from this is not that consultants are villains. It is that a firm large enough to shape a nation's policy is still answerable, and that a state with the will and the machinery can hold one to account and claw money back. That is the capacity question for the Caribbean. Who inside a small finance ministry reads the consultant's assumptions, tests the advice against the island's own interest rather than the template, and audits whether the region got value for what it paid. Where that capacity is thin, the advice goes unchallenged and the fee goes unquestioned.

There is a fiscal edge to it as well. The sum here is close to the entire tax the firm is said to owe, recovered because two European states had the investigative reach to pursue it. Caribbean tax administrations, pressed on staffing and data, rarely have that reach against a multinational, even as the region is lectured about its own tax transparency and pushed onto European and OECD lists. A basin that is asked to police its own houses to a global standard can fairly ask why the enforcement muscle runs so unevenly, and can study how a determined prosecutor actually recovers money from a giant.

The through-line is the one this paper keeps naming. A small state is a price-taker when it buys expensive advice it cannot interrogate and signs the plan that comes back. It moves toward being a price-maker when it builds enough of its own analytical capacity to challenge the model, negotiate the fee, and measure the result. The McKinsey seizure is a European headline, but the question it hands the Caribbean is domestic. What do we buy from our consultants, and who checks that we got it.