Confusion over E&Y's consultancy intentions
Ernst & Young has confirmed it will move back into management consultancy work when its five year non-competition agreement with Capgemini runs out next year.
Link: E&Y signals 2005 return to consultancy market
Eamonn Rice, head of fast growing financial services division in Edinburgh, told The Herald that his division was preparing to add ‘performance improvement’ – one of the services that was contractually banned when E&Y sold its consulting arm to Capgemini in 2000 – to its list of client services which include some of the UK’s major financial services institutions.
Despite this E&Y continues to insist it has no plans to return to the sector. ‘For the avoidance of doubt we have no intention of a return to mainstream consulting,’ the firm said in a statement.
In August, John Connolly, head of Deloitte, the only firm to resist selling its consulting arm, caused uproar in the industry when he accused the other three big firms of a ‘lack of transparency’ over their consulting activities.
Speaking to Accountancy Age he singled out PricewaterhouseCoopers as having an opaque consulting practice equal in size to his own firm’s.
‘You can’t see it clearly within the numbers that they publish, but it would not surprise me if it was a similar size to the one that we’ve got, or not far short of it,’ he said.