SEVERAL global firms have had their reputations damaged in South Africa—and worse. Bell Pottinger, a British public relations company, was destroyed by its work for the Guptas. It had branded attacks on the Guptas as motivated by “white monopoly capital” rather than concern for probity. Abandoned by clients, the firm has gone into administration.

According to a speech in the House of Lords by Peter Hain, a British peer, an 84m rand ($8m) grant from the Free State, designated for investment in a dairy farm, was transferred into the Standard Chartered account of a Gulf-based Gupta firm called Gateway, then into the account of another Gulf-based Gupta company called Accurate Investments (both accounts have since been closed); $2.6m of the money went back to South Africa, into a firm called Linkway Trading which used it to pay for a Gupta wedding. The money was written off as a business expense. Linkway’s auditor was KPMG.The firm has since said its audit work in the Linkway case “fell well short of the quality expected”.

A report by KPMG also gave credence to claims that the research-and-investigations unit of the South African Revenue Service (SARS) had “gone rogue”, which led to charges being laid against Pravin Gordhan, a former finance minister. KPMG has since said that the evidence did not support the conclusion that Mr Gordhan knew about the existence of a “rogue” unit, and that it regretted the impact of its report. Mr Gordhan is not mollified. The apology, he wrote in a newspaper article, did not go far enough. “The witting and over-enthusiastic collaboration of senior KPMG personnel...and their collusion with nefarious characters in SARS, in fact directly contributed to ‘state capture’ and gave legitimacy to the victimisation of good, honest professionals and managers.”

As a result of this debacle, the chairman, chief executive and chief operating officer in South Africa and five partners have left the firm; KPMG is repaying its 23m rand fee for the SARS report, and donating 40m rand, all the money it says it has earned from Gupta-connected firms, to education and anti-corruption NGOs. It has lost several clients in South Africa.

McKinsey got a contract to provide Eskom, the state power utility, with consultancy services, along with Trillian, a firm at the time majority-owned by Salim Essa, a business associate of the Guptas. The deal fell apart after six months, after which Eskom paid McKinsey 1bn rand and Trillian 564m rand. McKinsey says its work justified the fees; but the main question is not whether it should have been paid so much money, but whether or not Trillian was a subcontractor for McKinsey under the “supplier development programme” (SDP) which requires big companies to engage local firms; and if so, whether Trillian was doing real work. If it was not, its fee looks like a kickback.

Trillian’s former chairman asked Geoff Budlender, a South African lawyer, to produce a report on the matter. McKinsey told Mr Budlender that Trillian was not a subcontractor. But a (since departed) McKinsey partner wrote in a letter to Eskom’s CEO that “McKinsey has subcontracted a portion of the services to be performed under the agreement to Trillian.”

David Fine, McKinsey’s global head of public and social sectors, told a South African parliamentary committee investigating state capture at Eskom that the letter saying that Trillian was a subcontractor was inaccurate. But Mr Budlender concluded “that the denial of McKinsey [that Trillian was a subcontractor] is false. Why they made a false denial is for them to explain.”

On the question of whether Trillian was doing any real work or not, a former CEO of Trillian Management Consulting (TMC) who turned whistleblower says she raised concerns that McKinsey’s people were not engaging with TMC as the SDP required. She says she was told by a senior McKinsey employee that “regardless of TMC resources allocated to projects, TMC will still get their 30%.”

Corruption Watch, an NGO, will soon refer the case to America’s Department of Justice. Its complaint is that “the act whereby McKinsey agreed to partner with Trillian solely for purposes of obtaining the Eskom contract, under what was disguised as a development plan, amounts to an act of corruption under the [Foreign Corrupt Practices] Act (FCPA).” McKinsey rejects “any claims that [we] engaged in bribery or corruption related to our work at Eskom”.

According to Lord Hain, HSBC failed to close Gupta-linked accounts although staff in South Africa warned of suspicious transactions. HSBC says that it “has closed the accounts of Gupta-associated front companies wherever [it has] found them”. The issue has particular salience in America, where a five-year deferred-prosecution deal resulting from accusations that it failed to prevent money-laundering and sanctions-busting runs out this month; if it had broken American law again, it would face a renewed threat of prosecution.

After revelations in #Guptaleaks, SAP, a German software firm, launched an internal inquiry and found that it had paid $6.6m in commissions to Gupta-linked companies for contracts with state-owned enterprises. It reported itself to America’s Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission for possible breaches of the FCPA, has disciplined three employees, and will no longer pay commissions to employees who secure contracts in countries that score badly on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index.