To the South African community,

Bain & Company first opened an office in South Africa in 1997. Since then, our local team has supported dozens of local organisations, both corporate and community based, and has helped many South African businesses to grow and prosper. We are proud of that work, the people who made it happen and their contribution to the country.

However, it is clear we made some serious mistakes leading up to and including our engagement with the South African Revenue Service (SARS). We are deeply sorry for those mistakes. Our involvement with SARS, which ended in March 2017, was a failure – for South Africa and SARS, and clearly for Bain too. We erred in our judgement in taking on a piece of work which contributed to damaging a critical public institution. In the process, we let down our clients, our team, and our alumni. Most of all, we let down South Africa and her people.

After a thorough investigation by the law firm Baker McKenzie in 2018, which reviewed our work at SARS in detail, we better understood the mistakes we made and acknowledged and apologised publicly for them. These specific mistakes were:

• Significant errors in the procurement and execution of our work at SARS:
  • We had knowledge of the request for proposal (RFP) before it was formally issued.
  • We overstated the case for change.
  • We consented to a scope of work we should have known impaired our ability to deliver results for SARS.
  • We kept working at SARS even as it became clear that the SARS leadership had a different agenda than ours. We should have walked away instead of seeing out our contract through March 2017.
• Lapses in leadership by Vittorio Massone, Bain South Africa’s former office head, who was not truthful with the Nugent Commission or with us. He displayed poor judgement in:
  • meeting with former President Zuma;
  • meeting with Tom Moyane, the former SARS Commissioner, before Moyane’s appointment;
  • hiring a third-party to advise him on business development with the South African government; and
  • drawing us into the SARS assignment in the first place.
• Failures in management oversight which enabled these actions to take place and ignored red flags raised by both local and global leaders in our firm.
• We lacked specific protocols for working with government and the public sector.
• We did not provide further testimony to the Nugent Commission from those who worked with Massone on the SARS work.

We deeply regret these mistakes and are committed to ensuring that they are never repeated—in South Africa or anywhere else. We installed new local and regional leadership, established a South Africa Oversight Board, instituted a Global Risk function with an initial focus on public sector work following our experience in South Africa, and established a global whistle-blower hotline. In November 2018, we repaid all fees plus interest that we received for our engagement with SARS.

Why we are speaking now

The publication of the Zondo Commission’s final report has provided South Africa and the world with a clearer picture of how state capture unfolded. The final report outlines how many professional service providers in the private sphere, such as advisers, auditors, legal and consulting firms, were used to mask the corrupt nature of state capture. We regret that Bain was one of these consulting firms.

As a firm we are always accountable, and we recognise that we must accept responsibility for allowing Bain’s name and Bain’s work to be used to support state capture. This was avoidable – there were enough red flags that went unheeded. We chose instead to presume trust in our local office head. We have since put in place leadership changes and remedies to ensure this is not repeated.

Bain does not, however, accept that its representatives knowingly participated in state capture or an effort to damage SARS. Bain did the SARS work in good faith with every intention of helping to make SARS an even better organisation. Baker McKenzie’s subsequent investigation was extensive but ultimately could find no evidence of any intention by anyone at Bain to destroy or undermine SARS. Further, as part of Baker McKenzie’s investigation into Bain’s SARS work, a forensic accounting firm was engaged to conduct a detailed review of Bain’s banking and accounting records and found no evidence of any money flows from Bain to any government officials.

Our investigations and the investigations of both commissions of inquiry revealed many mistakes, which we acknowledge and regret, but they found no evidence of criminal behaviour. Neither commission of inquiry recommended Bain be prosecuted, unlike the many other individuals and entities that the Zondo Commission directly implicated in state capture and recommended should be prosecuted. We participated in both commissions of inquiry as best we could at the time, although we recognise with hindsight that we could have done more. We have offered our full cooperation to the relevant authorities and will continue to do so.

This site lays bare the facts, supported by evidence. We have shared a detailed response to the most misleading claims against Bain, including an overview of Baker McKenzie’s investigation into Bain’s work at SARS and other relevant documents. We have also included details of the remediation actions we took and the new processes we put in place several years ago in the aftermath of SARS.

While we know regaining South Africa’s trust will not be easy, we are committed to the cause. It is our earnest desire to make good our past wrongs and we remain committed to operating with integrity, meeting the high standards our clients expect and making a positive contribution to South Africa.

Manny Maceda
Worldwide Managing Partner, Bain & Company