Picture a reboot. Not the good kind, where they bring back the beloved cast for one last victory lap — the other kind, where the studio insists "it's a fresh start!" and then casts the exact same lead actor to play the exact same character, just with a slightly different haircut. That's KPMG's move this week, and nobody in the audience is pretending not to notice.

On 2nd July 2026, KPMG appointed Michael Ebeid as its new chair. Reasonable enough on paper — until you remember Ebeid spent the firm's recent ethics scandal actively defending it (not exactly a neutral bystander role). Now he's been handed the top seat, at the exact moment KPMG is supposed to be proving it's turned a corner.

Let's separate the punchline from the substance, because the substance matters here.

KPMG confirmed Ebeid as chair on 2nd July 2026. The appointment lands in the middle of ongoing scrutiny over the firm's leadership culture — scrutiny that hasn't cooled off, despite the firm clearly wanting it to. The complicating factor is Ebeid's own track record during the scandal: he was one of the voices defending KPMG's conduct at the time, not calling for reform of it.

That timeline is the whole story. It's not that KPMG appointed someone unqualified (nobody's arguing that). It's that they appointed someone whose public position, during the actual crisis, was "nothing to see here" — and now he's the person meant to convince everyone there's something different to see going forward.

Governance experts and commentators have picked up on exactly this tension: can an organisation genuinely reset its culture while keeping the same people who defended the old one in charge of resetting it? It's less a hypothetical and more the question sitting directly underneath this appointment.

Here's the thing: this isn't really a KPMG story. It's a "how do organisations actually change" story, and every founder, exec, and SME owner reading this has their own version of it waiting in the wings.

Culture resets are the easiest thing to announce and the hardest thing to actually do. Slap a new values deck on the intranet, issue a statement about "learnings" (translation: we got caught), and call it transformation. But if the person steering the ship post-crisis is the same person who insisted the ship wasn't sinking in the first place, you haven't changed direction — you've just changed the paint job.

For anyone running a business, the lesson isn't "never promote from within after a crisis." Sometimes the person who knows the organisation best genuinely is the right one to fix it. The lesson is that credibility isn't inherited from a job title; it's earned by demonstrating the position actually changed, not just the person occupying it. If your new "era" is led by someone whose defining public moment was defending the old one, you'd better have a very good explanation ready — because your staff, your clients, and (as KPMG is discovering) the entire business press will ask the question for you.

Somewhere in KPMG's comms department, someone is drafting a line about "a new chapter." Just, you know, maybe pick an author who didn't write glowing reviews of the last one.

— The Business Index Team