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Mixture of time value of money and interest/inflation.

You take that 85 Million and invest it (likely into growing a business unit but lets ignore that) and over 10 years it becomes greater than 85 million.

I might be splitting hairs here, but they say $85M in profit, not revenue, so presumably that would be margin on top of whatever they paid people to do nothing, and the fine is a portion of revenue that otherwise wouldn't have gone to them, of which $85M was profit.

Otherwise though, McKinsey was awarded $209M in federal gov contracts in Canada over 12 years, so the numbers themselves don't seem relatively outrageous in terms of what McKinsey makes news for.

$85M in 2014 dollars is $113M in 2024 dollars, and something tells me McKinsey didn't just leave the money sitting in a high yield savings account all this time