By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) – A former partner at McKinsey & Co pleaded guilty on Friday to obstructing justice by destroying records related to advice he and the consulting firm provided to Purdue Pharma on how to “turbocharge” sales of its opioid painkiller OxyContin.
Martin Elling, 60, entered his plea in federal court in Abingdon, Virginia, a month after the U.S. Department of Justice announced that his former employer had agreed to pay $650 million to resolve related charges over its work for Purdue.
Under his plea agreement, Elling faces up to a year in prison when he is sentenced on April 4. His lawyers, including Marjorie Peerce, in a joint statement said he “sincerely regrets his conduct for which he has fully accepted responsibility.”
The case followed years of investigations and litigation concerning the extent to which Purdue and other drugmakers contributed to a deadly opioid addiction epidemic in the U.S. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says nearly 727,000 opioid overdose deaths occurred from 1999 to 2022.
“Today’s guilty plea moves us forward in holding accountable not only those corporations responsible for the opioid crisis in America, but also the executives” who contributed to the tragedy, Acting U.S. Attorney Zachary Lee of the Western District of Virginia said in a statement.
The cases against McKinsey and Elling were filed following Purdue’s own guilty plea in 2020 to charges concerning widespread misconduct related to its marketing and sale of prescription painkillers.
Prosecutors said Elling was involved in helping McKinsey land work for Purdue in 2013 that resulted in the New York-based consulting firm crafting a strategy to boost sales of OxyContin.
The strategy involved targeting “high-value” prescribers in the medical field, including ones who prescribed opioids for illegitimate uses, prosecutors said.
According to charging papers, Elling was among only a few McKinsey partners who participated in a August 2013 meeting with members of the Sackler family who owned Purdue Pharma and ultimately adopted McKinsey’s proposal.
In July 2018, after reading a news article about a lawsuit filed by Massachusetts’ attorney general concerning Purdue’s marketing of OxyContin, Elling emailed another McKinsey partner.
“It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything other that [sic] eliminating all our documents and emails,” Elling wrote, according to court papers.
A month later, Elling emailed himself to “delete old pur (Purdue Pharma) documents from laptop,” charging papers state. Prosecutors said a forensic analysis of his laptop found he had in fact deleted materials relevant to investigations of Purdue.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
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