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In 2010, amid a historic
commodities boom fueled by the explosion of China’s economy,
international companies began turning their attention to Mongolia as it
opened its vast deposits of coal and copper to commercial exploitation.
Mongolia, which is located on China’s northern border, stood to make
prodigious sums of money if it could sell that copper and coal to its
resource-hungry neighbor.
To make that happen,
Mongolia concluded that it needed to lay thousands of miles of railroad
tracks. Such a project would cost billions of dollars and throw off
hefty fees for construction companies, banks, law firms and consultants
of various stripes. The consulting contracts alone could be worth tens
of millions over a decade. And if the railroad expansion worked out,
there’d be even more opportunities after that.
McKinsey & Co., the
global consulting behemoth, was interested. In the fall of 2010, Jimmy
Hexter, a senior partner at the firm, began talking with Mongolia’s
government about the railroad project. Hexter had spent decades in the
region, at one point running McKinsey’s office in Beijing. He was a
veteran of multiple infrastructure projects in Asia, a global leader of
the firm’s infrastructure practice and enthusiastic about Mongolia’s
potential.
Operating there required unusual caution. Earlier in 2010, the U.S. State Department had
issued a warning .
Corruption was on the rise in Mongolia, the State Department explained,
and U.S. enterprises needed “measures in place to detect and prevent”
it. In a section titled “current views on Mongolian corruption,” the
first problem cited was a “blurring of the lines between the public and
private sector brought about by systemic conflicts of interest at nearly
all levels.”
A year after that warning
was published, Hexter and McKinsey did exactly what American diplomats
had cautioned could be risky: The firm signed a consulting agreement
with a government entity even as the government adviser who brought
McKinsey into the project also landed a piece of the same contract for
his own private company.
McKinsey acknowledges that
it did not vet the adviser or his company in any formal way. The
adviser, Chuluunkhuu Ganbat, played a central role in shaping the
country’s rail expansion. Mongolia’s state-owned rail company hired a
team assembled by Ganbat, with McKinsey playing the leading role, to
conduct an analysis of whether the railroad plan was feasible.
McKinsey’s payment was little more than an introductory fee by the
firm’s standards — $4 million — but the contract spelled out that
McKinsey would be eligible for more lucrative multiyear contracts if the
project progressed.
The railroad expansion
quickly went bad. Construction stalled amid financial problems and
political uncertainty. By 2015, Mongolian police were investigating
claims of widespread embezzlement and fraud. McKinsey was drawn into the
investigation, with authorities ordering the firm to hand over records
related to the project.
The scrutiny rattled
McKinsey enough that its then-head of Asia operations, Kevin Sneader,
went above the heads of investigators. Shortly after police approached
the firm, he wrote to Mongolia’s prime minister without copying the
investigators. He insisted the firm had done nothing wrong and is
“committed to the highest professional and ethical standards.” The
letter suggested that Mongolia’s commercial prospects might be better
served if McKinsey were a partner. It cited the prime minister’s “strong
interest in promoting U.S.-Mongolian business ties and growing
third-neighbor investment in Mongolia.” Later in the letter Sneader
offered to “discuss with you in more detail our firm’s desire to further
contribute to the Mongolian economy or our work in Mongolia to date.”
McKinsey says its letter had no inappropriate purpose. Sneader has since
become the global managing partner of McKinsey, the firm’s highest
position.
Mongolian prosecutors did
not charge McKinsey. But the case and the events that led up to it,
which have never been reported apart from limited articles in the
Mongolian press, are part of a disturbing pattern for the consulting
giant. The Mongolia episode bears a striking similarity to the firm’s
actions in South Africa, where McKinsey reaped a global wave of
bad press ,
parliamentary scrutiny, client defections and criminal referrals after
briefly working alongside an unvetted company that had close ties to
scandal-plagued associates of that country’s president. The firm’s
operation in Saudi Arabia
was also criticized
in recent years for hiring the children of government officials, an act
that could potentially run afoul of American anti-corruption laws.
McKinsey has denied wrongdoing in both cases.
The Mongolian project raises questions about McKinsey’s compliance with
the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, or FCPA, according to legal experts.
One red flag was a government official doubling as a profit-seeking
business partner. Then there’s the allegation by Mongolian prosecutors
that the contract value was increased to $5.65 million from the $4
million they say the McKinsey team had requested. Assuming the
prosecutors are right, said Alexandra Wrage, president of TRACE
International, which works with companies to help them comply with
anti-corruption laws, “the only reason government officials and their
cronies do that is so money can be kicked back to them.”
McKinsey’s absence of due
diligence wouldn’t necessarily shield it from potential culpability,
experts say. The FCPA “specifies that engaging in willful avoidance is
the same as an affirmative act,” said Thomas Fox, a veteran lawyer who
advises companies on how to comply with the law.
McKinsey has not been
accused of violating the FCPA. It says it acted legally. “We took legal
advice throughout the course of the negotiations and project,” a
spokesman said. “We have seen no evidence that McKinsey personnel were
involved in or aware of any corruption in connection with this project.”
The firm says its work “delivered significant value and impact to our
client” and was “important for the country’s development.” In a separate
statement, the firm added, “This project was completed nearly a decade
ago. Since then, consistent with our commitment to continuously improve
our approach to risk and governance, we have strengthened a number of
our policies at a global level, including those governing how we serve
public sector and state-owned clients and where we partner with other
firms in client work."
Corruption charges were
ultimately filed against three people involved in the railroad project:
the country’s former transportation minister, the ex-director of the
state-owned railway company and Ganbat. The men misused their positions
to profit illegally off the McKinsey contract, prosecutors alleged:
steering the contract to McKinsey’s team, ensuring that the consulting
team include Ganbat’s private company and then increasing the contract’s
value by $1.65 million. Ganbat also faces corruption charges tied to a
later contract where his company was paid to help raise financing for
the railroad. The three men have denied the allegations and called them
politically motivated.
In two lengthy interviews,
Ganbat insisted that his relationship with the Transportation Ministry
was at arm’s length. “Even though we were inside the ministry, we were
really the external team,” he said. “And that, I think, has caused a lot
of confusion. They were perceiving that I was a government employee.”
This account of McKinsey’s
Mongolia dealings is based on hundreds of pages of government, financial
and McKinsey documents reviewed or obtained by ProPublica and
interviews with more than two dozen current and former Mongolian
officials, ex-McKinsey consultants and people familiar with the firm’s
work in the country.
Officially, the
railroad-related corruption case remains open. But a key change occurred
in the summer of 2017: One of the three men charged in the case, former
Transportation Minister Khaltmaa Battulga, was elected president of
Mongolia. Viewed by critics as autocratic, he has taken steps to torpedo
the case.
The political change has
also benefited McKinsey. The firm had found itself unofficially barred
from doing business in Mongolia for more than a year as a result of the
railroad case. The government has since permitted it to operate in the
country again, and Battulga’s election ensures that will continue. He
remains a devoted fan of McKinsey.
Before he ran for office,
Battulga, now 56, was one of Mongolia’s wealthiest businessmen and a
distinctive personage. A barrel-chested sambo wrestling champion, he has
long cultivated a tough-guy persona. He was so taken with Francis Ford
Coppola’s “Godfather” films that he took to wearing a Borsalino fedora
and named his holding company Genco, after the front company set up by
Vito Corleone. The Mongolian Genco owned a nightclub, a taxi service, a
lottery and a meat-processing plant, among other things.
Battulga’s swagger would
prove appealing to Mongolian voters, but it could come across as
thuggish and off-putting to international investors. Ganbat became a key
ambassador to that world. He had returned to Mongolia after eight years
in the United States, where he had attended graduate school and worked
at Commerzbank in New York. Ganbat offered business polish and finance
bona fides. He was young and handsome, with a charismatic smile. He
dressed in sleek suits, spoke excellent English, and came across as
savvy and refined. He would quickly become a close and trusted confidant
to the minister.
Then-Transportation
Minister Battulga appointed Ganbat, 35 at the time, as an adviser in
September 2009 and tasked him with laying the groundwork for
constructing the new railroad and other infrastructure projects. By
spring 2010, Ganbat was flying
to Europe as a government representative to drum up interest in the railroad among investors.
Even as Ganbat undertook
his public role, he also formed his own company, Liberty Partners, on
the side. Ganbat assembled a small staff of young Mongolians like
himself, educated abroad, with backgrounds in finance. They, too, had
dual roles, serving both the Transportation Ministry and Ganbat’s
profit-making endeavors. “The ministry did not have the necessary talent
and skill set to develop these projects,” he said. “The ministry was
basically piggybacking on us getting the government job done.”
In the fall of 2010, a
mutual acquaintance introduced Ganbat to Hexter. The interests of the
two men aligned. Hexter was hunting for infrastructure consulting
contracts in Mongolia. Ganbat and Liberty Partners were putting together
a team with an eye toward obtaining consulting contracts from the MTZ,
the Mongolian government-owned company responsible for building the new
railroad. Ganbat had already recruited the U.S. law firm Pillsbury
Winthrop Shaw Pittman and the French bank BNP Paribas. (Pillsbury and
BNP did not respond to requests for comment. Hexter, who left McKinsey
in 2014, did not reply to interview requests and questions emailed to
him.)
The first contract up was
for a feasibility study, an analysis of whether and how the railroad
could be built and operated in a cost-effective way. It was four months
of work, but more important, a chance to build an ongoing relationship.
The contract specified that McKinsey could become a general adviser for
the railroad project after the feasibility study was complete.
A small initial assignment
followed by an ongoing role is typical, according to “The Firm,” Duff
McDonald’s 2013 history of McKinsey. “Once they get the wedge end of a
relationship into a company in the form of one engagement, they usually
manage to hammer in the rest,” he wrote. “To wit: They never leave.”
For much of its 93-year
existence, McKinsey was a modest-sized partnership focused on its role
as counselor of top executives at giant multinational corporations.
Partners prided themselves on turning down business they felt was
beneath the firm.
But as the Cold War’s end
opened new markets worldwide, McKinsey reoriented its priorities toward
aggressive expansion. Between 1989 and 2019, the firm vastly enlarged
its global footprint, from offices in 44 cities across 23 countries to
offices in more than 130 cities spread across 66 countries today.
McKinsey reported $10 billion in revenues last year.
To sustain that kind of
growth, McKinsey had to push into less familiar territory, like
Mongolia, and into sectors, like government contracting, that the firm
had traditionally eschewed. Government contracts often require more
disclosure, bring more scrutiny, and are subject to more rules than
corporate ones. “McKinsey has grown to the point that it is taking on
work that prior incarnations of the firm would have turned down due to
the political risk involved,” a former McKinsey consultant
wrote in an anonymous recent essay in the magazine Current Affairs.
Mongolia offered
opportunities in two sectors: infrastructure and mining. The country had
recently undertaken to excavate massive coal and copper deposits buried
beneath the Gobi Desert.
Headlines in the international press were
trumpeting what they called “
Minegolia ,”
and the government was planning several major infrastructure projects
to capitalize. McKinsey had already found its way into the mining
sector,
advising the Mongolian government on privatizing state-owned mines. Now, Ganbat offered a foothold in infrastructure.
The railroad project would
take years to complete. The plan envisioned laying nearly 3,500 miles
of rail across an area more than twice the size of Texas. It was harsh
and undeveloped terrain, a plateau of desert and steppe roamed by
Bactrian camels and yurt-dwelling herders.
Even apart from the U.S.
government warning, there were reasons to proceed with extra caution.
Government infrastructure projects in resource-rich nations are
notorious hotbeds of corruption, and Mongolia already had a bad
reputation. It earned poor marks on Transparency International’s
Corruption Perceptions Index .
On a scale ranging from 10 (“very clean”) to 0 (“highly corrupt”),
Mongolia scored a 2.7, making it a tiny notch more pristine than
Azerbajian, but dirtier than Kazakhstan.
The greatest source of
concern for McKinsey, legal experts say, ought to have been Liberty
Partners, a new company run by a government adviser. According to a U.S.
Justice Department manual on the FCPA, a prospective local partner
owned by a foreign official raises “red flags that warrant significant
scrutiny.” Even a local partner “closely associated with” a foreign
official is a red flag.
Liberty came with a second
warning sign, experts say. It wasn’t paid upfront for assisting the
government in the railroad project. In exchange for that, the ministry
gave Ganbat’s company the right to obtain pieces of the contracts
awarded to foreign consultants, which is what ended up happening when
Liberty partnered with McKinsey. “I have not ever seen that situation,
where someone is representing a government and not being paid, with the
expectation of receiving contracts on the backend,” said Fox, the FCPA
specialist.
The arrangement aroused
suspicions in the Mongolian government at the time. “It felt shady,”
said one former official. “If you’re an adviser to the minister, you
have to deal on behalf of the country. You shouldn’t be fronting for
some company.”
Ganbat says he resigned
his position as Battulga’s adviser in the fall of 2010, before the
government’s contract with Liberty and McKinsey became effective. But a
letter accepting the resignation is dated months after they teamed up
and two weeks after the MTZ was authorized to hire McKinsey’s team.
People who worked and
dealt with Ganbat at the time
say he continued to operate as the top railroad adviser. (Initially,
McKinsey told ProPublica it couldn’t tell what its consultants knew
about Ganbat’s government role. But after ProPublica raised questions
about his resignation, the firm said Hexter believed Ganbat had resigned
before work began on the feasibility study.)
Documents and interviews
confirm that Ganbat was, in fact, a government official. The Mongolian
law under which Ganbat was appointed designates advisers like him public
servants responsible to the Transportation Ministry. He had a
Transportation Ministry
email address and phone number . He introduced himself as “Minister Battulga’s chief representative on railway,”
according to Mark Fung , an American lawyer who represented a group of Chinese investors.
Michael Koehler, a law
professor at Southern Illinois University specializing in
anti-corruption law, said, “If he had a government email address and was
acting on behalf of the Mongolian government, DOJ would consider that
person to be a Mongolian official himself.”
Despite the risks Ganbat’s
government role posed, McKinsey made no effort to investigate him and
his company before embarking on the project together. “Under standard
best practices, what McKinsey would do is take a deep dive into” Ganbat,
given his mix of public and private roles, said Fox, the FCPA lawyer.
That would include a review of business and tax records and likely
interviewing people familiar with Ganbat’s work.
McKinsey admits it didn’t
conduct any formal due diligence on Ganbat and Liberty Partners. The
firm says it felt comfortable working with them in part because other
foreign companies, like the law firm Pillsbury, had worked with Ganbat
before.
McKinsey’s lawyer
acknowledges that the firm could’ve been more careful and says it would
do better today. “With the enhanced policies McKinsey has today, I do
think McKinsey would have taken a different approach to diligence,” said
Charles Duross, who represents the firm in FCPA-related matters and led
the Justice Department’s FCPA unit from 2010 to 2014. “But that doesn’t
mean, at the end of the day, that because there are red flags or risks
related to a particular partner, that the conduct itself was corrupt or
improper or a violation of the FCPA.”
As the contract proposal
came under review, even more warning signs cropped up. Battulga abruptly
replaced the director of the MTZ, the entity that would hire the
Liberty-McKinsey team, with his former bodyguard, Baasandorj Batzaya.
Then there was the
absence of competitive bidding. That, prosecutors allege, violated
Mongolian law. (Criminal charges aren’t generally public in Mongolia,
but a 2017 document from the prosecutor general’s office, which
ProPublica obtained, quotes at length from the charges.)
Lastly, the price for the
feasibility study contract was increased in a suspicious way, according
to the prosecutors. McKinsey, Liberty Partners and their team had
offered to conduct the study for $4 million, prosecutors allege, but
just before the agreement was finalized, Ganbat and Battulga persuaded
the MTZ to raise the figure to $5.65 million. (McKinsey’s cut was $4
million before taxes. Liberty Partners got $800,000. The remainder went
to BNP Paribas and Pillsbury.)
If prosecutors are
correct, legal experts say, that would constitute a significant red
flag, given the risk the extra money might serve as a kickback. The FCPA
makes it illegal for an American company to give anything of value to a
foreign government official, directly or indirectly, in order to secure
an improper advantage in obtaining business.
McKinsey said it has seen
no evidence that the contract’s price increased. Ganbat described it
differently. He said the contract’s value did rise during negotiations
but only by about $400,000 and for a legitimate reason: the MTZ had
asked Liberty to hire subcontractors to analyze the soil along the
proposed railroad route and survey the terrain.
McKinsey and Ganbat
contend that a series of resolutions and directives permitting the MTZ
to hire their team led them to believe the contracting process was
legal.
But here, too, there were
irregularities. The head of the State Property Committee, which oversees
state-owned companies, declined to approve the contract unless Battulga
co-signed the relevant resolution. The SPC chief “was not feeling
comfortable signing alone” because of political issues around the
railroad project, Ganbat recalled.
And top officials at the
Ministry of Finance were unusually deferential to Battulga during the
approval process, according to a former ministry official. “My bosses
were frightened to ask him questions,” the former official recalled. He
never quite understood why. “That was a very secretive process.”
Eventually, the contract received formal approval and McKinsey and Liberty undertook the feasibility study.
From mid-April to
mid-August 2011, McKinsey consultants flew into Mongolia each week.
Battulga was closely involved, meeting frequently with Hexter and
Ganbat.
Liberty Partners served as
a local liaison for the foreign consultants. They arranged meetings,
supplied translations and helped McKinsey’s team collect data and
prepare presentations. Ganbat himself provided something more, people
familiar with the project said: His ties to Battulga were so close that
he was a conduit to the transportation minister and his thinking.
Neither Hexter nor a
second McKinsey partner on the project, both based in Beijing, had
worked in Mongolia before, and the firm leaned on Liberty for local
intelligence.
They weren’t the only ones
dependent on Ganbat and his staff. “MTZ was heavily, heavily reliant on
Liberty for all of its decisions,” Ganbat said. Its employees didn’t
speak English and lacked experience in finance. “So we basically almost
had to play in the shoes of the client on one hand and then also the
adviser on the other hand, since they didn’t have the capacity.”
McKinsey’s team ultimately
concluded that constructing and operating the first phase of the new
railroad could be done in a cost-effective manner. In all, according to
the team’s slide deck, the project would cost several billion dollars.
McKinsey predicted that, with increased coal exports and other revenue
streams, Mongolia could pay back investors within nine and a half years.
The government used the
feasibility study mainly to raise more than $1.5 billion to fund the
railroad and other infrastructure projects, a person familiar with the
process said. In retrospect, that would be the high point of the
endeavor.
Within a couple of years,
“Minegolia” was already starting to look like an example of the
resource curse: The railroad project stalled amid a welter of
misfortunes, as the government squandered funds on dubious handouts and
subsidies. “Like a number of other large infrastructure projects in
Mongolia, the railroad project got stuck in a quagmire of competing
domestic political and economic interests, fluctuations in commodity
prices, questionable policy decisions, corruption and plain theft,” said
Julian Dierkes, a Mongolia expert and professor at the University of
British Columbia.
As boom collapsed into
bust, financial crimes and anti-corruption investigators in Mongolia
began to pursue allegations of graft in failed infrastructure projects.
In the fall of 2015, the investigation reached McKinsey. Police began to
request information about the feasibility study. At the same time, they
raided the offices of the MTZ and Liberty Partners, where they seized
contracting records, financial documents and Ganbat’s computers,
according to police records and people familiar with the investigation.
They issued subpoenas for Liberty’s banking records.
“McKinsey wasn’t the
principal object of the investigation, but the police did investigate
them quite seriously,” said a person with direct knowledge of the
investigation. “It got quite aggressive.”
The firm says it
cooperated with investigators’ requests. McKinsey also says it
investigated the matter internally. But even as that process continued,
McKinsey wrote directly to the prime minister. In a letter dated Nov.
24, 2015, Sneader began: “Given your strong interest in promoting
U.S.-Mongolian business ties and growing third-neighbor investment in
Mongolia, I’m writing to you today to inform you of a current situation
facing McKinsey & Company related to past work in Mongolia.” He
asserted that the firm operated with “highest levels of probity” and
invited the prime minister to visit McKinsey’s U.S. offices. McKinsey
submitted a statement to ProPublica that read, “As its text makes clear,
this letter was sent to address misconceptions about our firm’s work,
including those appearing in the local media, to explain to the prime
minister that McKinsey had conducted itself with the utmost integrity,
and to express our commitment to assist the ongoing investigation.
Before sending the letter, we consulted with outside advisors on how to
appropriately convey this message. To suggest that this letter was
intended for any inappropriate purpose would be false.
Around the same time,
prosecutors charged Batzaya and Ganbat with manipulating the feasibility
study contract to enrich themselves. Police arrested Batzaya. Ganbat
was traveling abroad at the time and decided not to return, believing he
wouldn’t receive a fair trial. Prosecutors charged Battulga as a
co-conspirator in 2017, after he lost his seat in Parliament and was no
longer shielded by governmental immunity.
The three men have denied
the charges. Although Batzaya and Battulga did not respond to requests
for comment, Ganbat and his allies say the case is part of a smear
campaign orchestrated by Battulga’s enemies.
“Yes, there was the
situation” with McKinsey, Ganbat said, “how exactly McKinsey was hired
and whether we had any conflict of interest. There were fine points to
it. Yes, we were in a peculiar situation. But in my mind, at least, I
tried to do as much as possible to remove myself out of conflict and do
what’s best for the country.”
McKinsey never faced
charges. But the affair left its consultants unwelcome in Mongolia. The
banishment was a blow, shutting the firm out of a potentially lucrative
market.
Meanwhile, things went
from bad to worse for Mongolia. Politicians there misspent or stole
hundreds of millions of dollars raised to fund the railroad’s
construction, and in 2017, the government was forced to
seek a bailout package from the International Monetary Fund to avoid defaulting on its bond obligations.
In the wake of criticism
for its problems in South Africa and elsewhere, McKinsey has begun
announcing new procedures in the past year.
Prospective local partners
will now be subjected to “a rigorous pre-screening.” Projects for
state-owned enterprises will now face the same in-depth risk review
government projects receive. In recent interviews with
CNBC and
Fortune , Sneader said the firm is planning further changes to how it oversees its consultants’ work and vets its clients and partners.
But there are structural
barriers at McKinsey to making these changes effective, according to
former consultants and observers. The firm is a partnership; it lacks
the top-down control of a corporation. “McKinsey has always been a
decentralized organization,” McDonald wrote in “The Firm.” “The actual
business of consulting” tends “to be left to the consultants
themselves.”
That has bred a culture of
partner autonomy. People who have worked or dealt with the firm’s
previous chief, Dominic Barton, recall instances where senior partners
openly rejected his requests. “You have to realize that most McKinsey
partners are at McKinsey because they don’t want to be told what to do,”
Angus Dawson, the new head of the firm’s operations in Australia and
New Zealand,
told a local newspaper in March.
A diffuse operating style
worked for McKinsey when it had 300 partners or so, as it did 30 years
ago. But the firm now has over 2,100 partners, and oversight of their
engagements remains limited. Sneader
told the Financial Times
that he would like to see the entire partnership weigh in on more
decisions. But corralling 2,100-plus partners who cherish their
independence is no easy task.
Past efforts at central
management have fared poorly. One past managing partner, for example,
assigned a senior partner to instill discipline within the financial
institutions group, a rainmaker division with a habit of disregarding
wider firm interests, according to “The Firm.” The group shrugged off
its would-be master. After four months, the senior partner gave up and
resigned from McKinsey.
McKinsey’s exile from
Mongolia was a grave enough matter that the firm’s leaders attempted
high-level diplomacy at the ultimate conclave of the elite: the World
Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. In January 2017 at the Alpine
conference, then-managing partner Barton and Sneader met with Mongolia’s
president at the time, Tsakhia Elbegdorj.
Sneader followed up with a
letter to a top presidential aide. Calling the conversation “warm” and
“productive,” he wrote: “As we discussed at our meeting, I’d be very
grateful if we could receive an assurance at your earliest convenience
that our consultants would be welcome in Mongolia. An official letter to
that effect would help us make arrangements to reestablish our presence
in the country.”
It’s not clear whether McKinsey ever received such a letter. But the firm was ultimately allowed to return to Mongolia.
Battulga’s election to the presidency, in July 2017, has only improved the outlook. He retained a soft spot for McKinsey.
On the campaign trail , he recalled having “proudly worked” with its consultants, whom he called “the smartest business thinkers in the world.”
Battulga’s election may
have benefited McKinsey. But its effect on Mongolia is an open question.
His critics have decried what they call his authoritarian moves. In
March, Battulga
rushed through Parliament a law that makes it
easier for him
to dismiss senior prosecutors and the leadership of the anti-corruption
agency that investigated the railroad project. In a statement at the
time, he justified the new statute as targeting corruption among the
nation’s law enforcement leadership, and in particular those who
investigated and charged him. Battulga and his allies
promptly fired
the country’s top prosecutors, who had supervised the case against him,
Ganbat and Batzaya and threw out the leaders of the anti-corruption
agency.
Meanwhile, construction of
the railroad remains halted indefinitely, the project far from
complete. In the Gobi Desert, eroding earthen berms — unfinished rail
beds — rise like burial mounds. “We really needed this railroad,” one
former Mongolian official said. “We have one of the biggest coking coal
deposits in the world, and we’re sitting right next to China,” a major
coal consumer. He doesn’t know what happened to much of the money raised
while he was in government. But he knows where a few million dollars
went. McKinsey’s legacy, he said, “is just a pile of dirt.”
Source:https://www.propublica.org