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Two of Boston Consulting Group’s senior executives will leave their leadership roles within the wake of revelations concerning the firm’s work in Gaza, based on people acquainted with the matter.
Adam Farber, chief risk officer, and Wealthy Hutchinson, head of BCG’s social impact practice, will lose those jobs following the outcomes of an internal investigation, the firm told staff on Thursday.
They are going to remain at BCG in client-facing roles, the people said. BCG declined to comment.
The 2 men were named in a Financial Times report last week as having been involved in discussions about BCG’s expanding work related to Gaza, although the firm says they were misled concerning the exact nature of the project. The firm has already fired the 2 partners who led the work.
The FT revealed that a BCG team helped model the prices of relocating Palestinians outside Gaza as a part of a project examining how the shattered enclave might be rebuilt as a regional trading hub.
BCG staff had also been more involved with the launch of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) than the firm had publicly acknowledged, the FT reported. GHF is an Israel- and US-backed aid programme designed to exchange UN administered aid, whose launch has been marred by the killings of a whole lot of Palestinians, based on Gaza’s health ministry.
Farber is a 27-year veteran of BCG and led the firm’s global healthcare practice before, in 2022, moving to turn into chief risk officer. In that role, he oversaw BCG’s risk management function and had responsibility for ensuring it has policies and procedures designed to guard the firm, based on a web-based biography.
In a memo to alumni earlier this week, BCG chief executive Christoph Schweizer said that there had been “process failures” related to the work in Gaza and that the project to model the relocation of Palestinians particularly had been “reputationally very damaging”.
“Our involvement with the work in Gaza was the results of deliberate individual misconduct and it was enabled by unwarranted process exceptions, missed warning signs, and misplaced trust,” Schweizer wrote. “Our processes weren’t applied as they were designed to be.”
Hutchinson has been at BCG for greater than 25 years, bar a brief stint running a start-up, based on his LinkedIn profile. As head of the social impact practice, he greenlit and funded the initial pro bono project wherein BCG helped sketch out the help organisation that became GHF.