The US Senate Banking Committee voted nearly unanimously to approve Mary Jo White as the new head of the SEC after a series of discussions and questions focusing on her history as a lawyer for large Wall Street firms.
The committee voted 21 to 1 to approve White, with all Republicans backing her and only one Democrat voting against her. The bipartisan support suggests White, who has served both as a prosecutor and a defense lawyer for large investment banks, will easily pass a full Senate vote in a few days.
The vote follows a meeting in which senators grilled White over her previous work for the law firm Debevoise & Plimpton where she defended large investment banking clients such as JP Morgan, UBS and Morgan Stanley. Under questioning, White said she would work quickly to finish regulations remaining under the Dodd-Frank Act and the Jumpstart Our Business Startups, or JOBS Act. Other major initiatives underway at the SEC include Regulation SCI, which seeks to better follow high frequency trading (HFT) and ongoing litigation related to the global financial crash of 2008.
If approved in the full Senate, White will serve as chairman of the SEC until June 5 of 2014 to finish the term started by Mary Schapiro, who resigned in December last year. The Senate Banking Committee declined to vote on a full five-year term for White.
‘I don’t question Mary Jo White’s integrity or skill as an attorney. But I do question Washington’s long-held bias towards Wall Street and its inability to find watchdogs outside of the very industry that they are meant to police,’ Democrat Senator Sherrod Brown, chairman of the Senate Banking Subcommittee on Financial Institutions and Consumer Protection and the only dissenter in the vote, says in a press release. ‘Mary Jo White will have plenty of opportunities to prove me wrong. I hope she will.’
In nominating White to head the SEC in January, US President Barack Obama said: ‘You don’t want to mess with Mary Jo. Over a decade as a US Attorney in New York, she helped prosecute white-collar criminals and money launderers. In the early 1990s, she brought down John Gotti, head of the Gambino crime syndicate. And she brought to justice the terrorists responsible for bombing the World Trade Center and the American embassies in Africa. So I’d say that’s a pretty good run.’
