It's not a deliberate sabotage. It's more like the author subtly set things up for a failure. In this case, the guy knew his people really well, and understood

It's not a deliberate sabotage. It's more like the author subtly set things up for a failure. In this case, the guy knew his people really well, and understood that any external team would have certain weaknesses relative to the internal one: understanding business context, requiring clear goal setting, etc. And he worked from there. I've seen similar things happen within a relatively large org. And that one time it was not about in-house vs offshore, it was more about "this branch of the org" vs "the other branch of the org". In particular, a C++ team was suggested working with a new Erlang team on a project they though of as something they should be delivering. To be honest, the C++ team was really good, just as the in-house team in the story was described as very efficient. And they won this one round.