Will Arnab Ghatak, Former McKinsey Partner, Face U.S. Criminal Charges

Martin Elling, Arnab Ghatak’s former McKinsey colleague, faces up to 20 years in prison for obstruction of justice over Purdue opioid case

December 13, 2024

Martin Elling, a former McKinsey & Co. senior partner, pled guilty today to “knowingly destroying records, documents and tangible objects with the intent to impede, obstruct and influence” an investigation, the United States Department of Justice said in a statement.

From 2017 onwards, McKinsey advised Purdue Pharma on the sales and marketing of its extended-release opioid drug, OxyContin, including on how to “turbocharge” sales of the drug. In 2017, McKinsey consultants advised the Sackler family members, who then owned Purdue, that opioid sales can be boosted by giving distributors a rebate for every overdose attributable to pills they sold, according to a report in The New York Times.

This advice was given at a time when thousands were dying each year from opioid overdoses. In the U.S., from 1999-2018, nearly 450,000 people died from overdoses involving opioids, including prescription and illicit opioids. Compared to the general population, a patient who receives three months of prescribed opioids is 30 times more likely to overdose and die.

The opioids are normally prescribed by doctors to patients with severe pain resulting from major medical procedures, cancer, or acute physical injuries. But many patients, who take the drug, can get addicted to it. Also, federal and state investigators found some drug companies had aggressively promoted sales of their highly addictive opioid drugs, in order to boost profits.

Elling was the Director of the client services team for approximately 30 of McKinsey’s engagements with Purdue and was involved in securing the consulting engagement for McKinsey. Elling, 60-years-old, is a U.S. citizen currently residing in Bangkok. He faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, three years of supervised release and a fine up to $250,000 for the obstruction of justice charge. A judge will determine any sentence for Elling.

Today, McKinsey agreed to pay $650 million to resolve a criminal and civil investigation into the firm’s consulting work with Purdue. This includes a forfeiture of over $93 million, reflecting all the money McKinsey was paid by Purdue from 2004 to 2019. McKinsey is a privately owned consulting firm with 45,000 employees in more than 65 countries, with its main office in New York City.

Purdue, which is based in Stamford, Connecticut, manufactures, markets, and sells prescription opioids, including OxyContin, Butrans, and Hysingla.

In 2013, Arnab (Arnie) Ghatak, a consultant at McKinsey, emailed his colleagues that, a meeting in which he and other McKinsey colleagues persuaded the Sacklers to aggressively market OxyContin, “went very well,” the New York Times reported.

In June 2018, the Massachusetts Attorney General sued Purdue “for misleading prescribers and consumers about the addiction and health risks of their opioids, including OxyContin, to get more people to take these drugs, at higher and more dangerous doses, and for longer periods of time to increase the companies’ profits.”

“Since 2008,” the complaint states, “Purdue has sent sales representatives to push its opioids in Massachusetts doctors’ offices, clinics, and hospitals more than 150,000 times and has given money, meals, or gifts to more than 2,000 Massachusetts prescribers. Purdue also rewarded prescribers with consulting deals worth tens of thousands of dollars and kept promoting drugs to them even when the doctors wrote illegal prescriptions, lost their medical licenses, and their patients died.” From 2008 to 2018, Purdue sold more than 70 million doses of opioids in the state of Massachusetts, generating revenue of more than $500 million.

The lawsuit says McKinsey advised the Sacklers on instructing their sales force “to maximize profits by ‘emphasizing [the] broad range of doses’ — which was code for pushing the doses that were highest and most profitable.” Also, McKinsey helped Purdue to plan on how to “counter the emotional messages from mothers with teenagers that overdosed” on OxyContin.

In July 2018, Elling allegedly emailed another senior partner, said to be Arnab Ghatak: “Just saw in the FT (Financial Times) that [Purdue board member] is being sued by states attorneys general for her role on the [Purdue] Board. It probably makes sense to have a quick conversation with the risk committee to see if we should be doing anything other [than] eliminating all our documents and emails. Suspect not but as things get tougher there someone might turn to us.” According to court documents, the Justice Department states, “forensic analysis of Elling’s McKinsey-issued laptop found that Elling in fact removed materials related to McKinsey’s work for Purdue from the laptop, as well as a Purdue-related folder from his Outlook email account.”

Arnab Ghatak was fired by McKinsey in 2021.

He earned a joint MD, MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, 2001, and a Bachelors in Molecular Biology from Princeton University, 1996. He is the son of Mitali Ghatak and Subhatosh Ghatak. His father was a mechanical engineer for the city of Columbus, Ohio, and his mother worked at a Medicaid office.

In April this year, Ghatak sued his former employer McKinsey accusing it of defaming him and making him a "scapegoat" to distract attention from its work advising Purdue and other manufacturers of opioid pain medications, Reuters reported.

In an earlier LinkedIn profile, Ghatak stated he was a senior partner and a leader of the Global Public Health practice at McKinsey. The earlier post also stated that he was on the boards of the Global Fund for Children and Pangaea Global, an AIDS philanthropy. Currently there is no mention of him on the sites of either of these philanthropies.

In his lawsuit, Ghatak alleged that McKinsey and its global managing partner, Bob Sternfels, lied to the U.S. Congress and the public about Ghatak’s role in deleting emails. Ghatak said McKinsey knew no evidence existed of him improperly deleting emails, yet had promoted the narrative "to create a scapegoat as a diversion from their own decades long work in non abuse deterrent opioids," according to Reuters.

It is not known if Ghatak faces criminal investigations by the Department of Justice over his role, while at McKinsey, over opioid sales by Purdue; or if he is co-operating with the investigations.

In 2020, Cynthia Munger’s son was recovering from opioid addiction after being prescribed Purdue’s OxyContin more than a decade earlier as a high school baseball player with a shoulder injury. Pushing for Purdue owners and company officials to be charged with crimes, she told AP, “Until we do that and we stop accusing brick and mortar and not individuals, nothing will change…”