BCG demotes two senior leaders amid damage control efforts for Gaza project
Boston Consulting Group (BCG) on Thursday stripped Adam Farber, chief risk officer, and Rich Hutchinson, social impact practice leader, of their roles amid scrutiny of the firm’s work in Gaza.
Farber and Hutchinson will remain at the firm as senior partners holding client-facing roles.
A Financial Times report revealed that a BCG team worked on a postwar financial model to relocate Palestinians from Gaza.
BCG has disavowed the work, saying it was undertaken by two rogue partners who did the controversial consulting in secret. Matt Schlueter and Ryan Ordway, partners in the firm’s public sector defense and security practice, were fired in June.
BCG’s pro bono work on Gaza humanitarian efforts began in fall, with the firm saying it expected to support a broad, internationally recognized coalition.
That early work fell under the purview of Hutchinson’s social impact practice, which allocated hours to the pro-bono project. Farber, as risk officer, also evaluated the project in its early stages.
That project evolved into supporting the development and management of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a widely criticized Israel- and US-backed aid program. Since the launch of the program in May, hundreds of Palestinians seeking supplies have been killed near the aid sites, according to Palestinian health authorities.
“In late 2024 a BCG partner misrepresented pro bono work. Months later he began a paid phase of work without authorization, and in parallel, he and another partner undertook off-the-books modeling on Gaza reconstruction scenarios, directly against BCG instructions,” BCG told The Wall Street Journal on Thursday.
The Boston-based consultancy is now conducting an intensive review of internal processes and controls, a person familiar with the matter told The Wall Street Journal. A group of three senior leaders is overseeing the firm’s risk and compliance function in the interim.
In a memo last week, CEO Christoph Schweizer told staff that there had been “process failures” in its Gaza work. He added that although the project was not a formal BCG project, it was nonetheless “reputationally very damaging.”
Nonprofit group Save the Children last month suspended its pro-bono partnership with BCG.
Meanwhile, the UK parliamentary committee has sent a letter to BCG asking the firm to provide a detailed timeline on its involvement with GHF, as well as the scope of the ousted partners’ work on modeling the costs of Palestinian relocation.
