Christopher Cox

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Charles Christopher Cox (born October 16, 1952) is an American lawyer and former Chairman of the US Securities and Exchange Commission, a Republican member of the 17-year-old United States House of Representatives, and a member of the White House Staff at the Reagan Administration. Before working in Washington, he was a lawyer, a teacher, and an entrepreneur. Since 2014, he has been a partner of Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP and president of Morgan Lewis Consulting LLC.

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Cox was born at St. Paul, Minnesota. After graduating from Saint Thomas Academy in Mendota Heights, Minnesota in 1970, Cox earned a B.A. at the University of Southern California in 1973, following an accelerated three-year course. He is also a Delta Tau Delta fraternity member. In 1977, he earned his M.B.A. from Harvard Business School and J.D. from Harvard Law School, where he became an Editor of the Harvard Law Review.

Maps Christopher Cox

Initial career

From 1977-1978, he served as a legal employee for Judge Herbert Choy of the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In October 1978, Cox was paralyzed from the waist down after a serious off-road Jeep accident in the rainforest of Hawaii ? Moloka Island ? i. He eventually regained the ability to walk but wore armor and leather straps for six months. He still has two metal screws on his back, and according to the 2005 magazine profile Fortune , "has been in pain every day for the last 27 years." Since he can not sit for a long time, he has a special desk that allows him to work while standing.

As a contestant at the NBC-TV game Password Plus game, Cox won over $ 5,000 for several appearances. According to the re-broadcast of Password Plus on the GSN cable network, Cox appeared in 1980 and won $ 5,400 in cash.

From 1977 to 1986, Cox first became a partner and later partnered with the international law firm Latham & amp; Watkins. On his retirement in 1986, he was a Corporate Responsibility Partner at the Orange County office, and served as member of the company's national management. In 1982-1983, Cox took leave from Latham & amp; Watkins to teach federal income tax at Harvard Business School.

In 1984, Cox founded Conext Corporation, which produces English daily reproductions of Soviet-controlled newspapers, Pravda . This publication is used primarily by US universities and US government agencies, and is eventually distributed to customers in 26 countries around the world. The company has no connection with the Soviet government.

During his second term Ronald Reagan from 1986 to 1988, he served as Senior Associate to the President. His job included advising on the nomination of three Supreme Court judges, the establishment of the Brady Commission after the 1987 market crash, and the drafting of a legislative reform proposal for the federal budget process.

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US. Congress

Cox was elected to Congress in 1988 from what was then California's 40th District. He was re-elected eight times more than the Orange County-based district, which was re-numbered as the 47th District in 1993 and the 48th District in 2003.

Early in his congressional career, Cox made friends with two anti-Communists in Hungary and Lithuania who had become prisoners of conscience and who later became the presidents of their countries after the end of Soviet domination. Cox met ÃÆ'rpÃÆ'¡d GÃÆ'¶ncz in 1989, and when Cox later married, he spent part of a honeymoon in Hungary with President GÃÆ'¶ncz and his wife MÃÆ'¡ria Zsuzsanna GÃÆ'¶ntÃÆ' Â © r. Cox met Dr. Vytautas Landsbergis, a professor at the Conservatory of Music in Vilnius, in 1989, long before the successful re-establishment of Lithuanian independence. Landsbergis Night was elected President of Lithuania, he embraced Cox on the airport runway in Vilnius after the Soviet Union held Cox in East Berlin for a long time. In May 1998, Cox was presented with the Order of the Great Duke of Lithuania Gediminas, the highest honor that the Republic of Lithuania could accord to a living stranger.

In 1989, Polish President Lech Wa ?? sa joined Cox in a Washington, DC ceremony marking the enactment of the Cox legislation that established the Polish-American Company Fund. Together with the Baltic-American Corporate Fund, the Hungarian-American Corporate Fund, and seven other corporate funds in Central and Eastern Europe as well as the former Soviet Union, the Cox legislation, incorporated in the Eastern Europe Democratic Support Act (SEED) US. foreign aid with venture capital in newly free countries from the former Warsaw Pact. Cox has a smooth language in Russian.

In 1994, Cox was appointed by President Clinton to the Bipartisan Commission on Tax Rights and Reforms, which in 1995 published a unanimous report warning that the state could not continue to allow the right programs to consume a rapidly increasing share of the federal budget.

Among the well-known Cox legislative successes is the Internet Tax Freedom Act, a 1998 law that prohibits federal, state and local government taxation on Internet access and prohibits Internet-only levies such as email taxes , bit taxes, and bandwidth taxes. With Rep. AS, Barney Frank (D-MA) as its main co-sponsor, Cox made law in 1997 to privatize the National Helium Reserves, which then $ 1.4 billion in debt to taxpayers. In 2004, this was the third largest privatization in US history, surpassing the value of privatization of the 1988 Conrail. Cox also wrote the only law enacted over President Bill Clinton's veto, Private Private Securities Law Procedure Act of 1995, aimed at protecting investors from fraudulent and excessive lawsuits.

For 10 of the 17 years in Congress, from 1995 to 2005, Cox served in the House of Representatives Majority Leadership as Chairman of the House of Representatives' Policy Committee, the fifth-placed leadership position (behind the Chairman, Majority Leader, Majority of Whips, and Chairman of the Republican Conference). He is the Chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, as well as Chairman of the US National Selected Security Committee that produced the Cox Report, Chinese espionage charges and security failures in several US national laboratories.

When Congress established the Bipartisan Study Group on the Enhancement of Multilateral Export Controls through federal law in 1999, Cox was intercepted as deputy chairman. The group published the report unanimously in 2001 recommending the modernization of wholesale US export controls. Cox also serves as Chairman of the Selected Committee at Homeland Security (predecessor of the permanent House Committee); Chairman of the Task Force at the Capital Market; and Head of Task Force on Budget Process Reform.

In the spring of 2001, Cox Representatives was later considered by President George W. Bush for a federal appeals jury in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. Cox withdrew his name from consideration before the nomination could be made because one of his states Senator Democrat, Barbara Boxer, objected to him because of perceived conservatism [2] [3]. The Cox seats have been considered for ultimately filled by Bush's Carlos T. Bea nomination.

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AS. Chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission

Cox was nominated by President George W. Bush to become the 28th Chair of the United States Securities and Commerce Commission (SEC) on June 2, 2005 and unanimously confirmed by the United States Senate on 29 July 2005. He was sworn in August 3, 2005.

Shortly after becoming Chairman of the SEC, he was diagnosed with thymoma, a rare type of cancer, and underwent surgery in January 2006 to remove the tumor from his chest. He returned to work "after several weeks recovering from surgery," according to The Associated Press. (Cancer returns 10 years later, but Cox is once again given a clean bill of health after surgery and treatment.)

In May 2008, Cox delivered the Initial Address at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. In April 2008, he received the University of Southern California's highest award, ASA V. Call Achievement Award, at a ceremony at the Los Angeles Millennium Biltmore Hotel.

The 2008 Housing and Economic Recovery Act, adopted in July 2008, awarded Cox one of five seats in the Federal Housing Finance Board, which advises the Director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in connection with Fannie's comprehensive health and safety strategy and policy Mae, Freddie Mac, and Bank Federal Home Loan. In September 2008, the US Congress passed and President Bush signed the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008, which puts Cox on the newly established Financial Stability Supervisory Board to oversee the $ 700 billion Troubled Asset Assistance Program.

Rules Initiative

During his tenure, Cox led the Commission to implement a new executive compensation rule. Since the early 1990s, support for reform has evolved, driven by the US Board of Financial Accounting Standards and others. Relying on some of the FASB recommendations to improve the presentation of compensation information, Cox's reforms enable users of financial statements to quickly understand how public company executives are compensated. The new required information includes the lump-sum costs of retirement benefits and an explanation of why a specific stock option fund is approved. The New York Times observes that the Commission "mostly stood on the ground amid pressure from compensation specialists, investors supporters and industry groups." With more than 20,000 comments, Cox said, "There is no problem in the history of the SEC that has generated such interest."

One of his first initiatives is to launch a clear English effort, to eliminate the legal in investor communication that supports clear language that allows investors to focus on what's important, better to hold a company's performance up to the light of day. Not only executive compensation rules, but also disclosure rules for investment and mutual fund advisers - where more than half of US households have their retirement savings and lectures - are subject to clear English requirements. Under the Cox SEC, a new regulation requires a $ 10.6 trillion mutual fund industry to make their prospectus easier for investors to read, understand, and access.

Cox defended the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act and rejected attempts to revoke it or reconsider legislatively. The biggest source of complaints about the law during his tenure was Section 404, which resulted in much higher compliance costs than the SEC under predecessor predicted. Working with the Public Company Accounting Supervisory Board, the SEC under the Cox replaces the original audit standards for Section 404 in a more streamlined, more cost-effective version, and also provides new guidance for management intended to reduce unnecessary costs. At Cox's direction, the agency conducted a nationwide Small Business Costs Study to determine whether, as mentioned, the new audit standards and management guidelines have made compliance cheaper and better focused on 404 processes on the control elements that are absolutely essential for the company of all size..

In June 2007, the Commission voted unanimously to revoke the so-called "uptick rules" or "checks". The action was not controversial at the time: it was taken after extensive multi-year study by the Office of Economic Analysis, beginning in 2003 under Chairman Bill Donaldson. The study finds that the rules - which have never been applied to the NASDAQ or ECN and other trading systems - have become ineffective on the NYSE because of the decimation (ie, the reduction of the tick "tick" to cents, as compared to the 1/8 or 12½ prevailing when the rules were adopted in 1938). The retraction then became a matter of debate, with some advocating his recovery. On July 15, 2008, Cox told the US House of Representatives that the Commission is studying potential institutions "pricing tests that can work on a penny or a penny" or some more meaningful amount.

Technology modernization

The modernization of SEC technology is Cox's priority throughout his tenure. He introduced new technologies for investor disclosure, compliance analytics, sharing of national investigative work, and fund management gained for investors. In August 2008 it launched a future replacement database disclosure based on the SEC form, called EDGAR, with a new interactive disclosure system using computer-tagged data in Efficient Business Reporting Languages ​​(XBRL). The new system is designed to enable future investors to easily search, sort and re-combine information to generate reports and analysis from hundreds of thousands of companies and millions of forms. Under Cox SEC oversees the creation of a taxonomy of over 11,000 XBRL data tags that catalog every element of the US Accounting Principles Received. In 2008 the Commission passed a regulation requiring all public companies and mutual funds in the United States to mark their financial information.

Other Cox technology initiatives liberalize proxy rules to enable investors and companies to use the Electronic Shareholder Forum - a virtual meeting place on the Internet to promote shareholder initiatives, conduct polls, advise the company directors on critical shareholder issues, and notify shareholders management and views of directors.

In 2006, the SEC launched a war against internet finance spam, turning off trading at companies that touted their stocks by clogging in-box investors. Investor complaints about the practice fell from more than 220,000 per month in December 2006 to 70,000 per month in February 2007; Symantec's Internet software and services company credits the SEC by cutting financial spam by up to 30 percent.

This technological initiative is widely supported, with one observer noting that Cox "gained universal praise for technologically modernizing, transparency and understanding of corporate reporting, and for providing apple-to-apple comparisons (for the first time) corporate executive compensation."

Focusing on individual and senior investors

The special needs of senior investors, whose rank is growing rapidly, is a special Cox focus. In April 2006, the SEC held its first "Elderly Summit", working with AARP, the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the North American Securities Administrators Association, and several state regulators; conferences are now held every year. National sweep checks conducted by the SEC and authorities in seven states found that the "free lunch" investment seminar, which attracted large numbers of retirees, routinely involved significant fraud. Many are suggesting to put their retirement funds into an equity-index annuity, where they can get stock market returns while keeping their money "safe". But neither these investments, nor the sales agents, are registered with state or federal securities regulators - and investors often do not realize that it is impossible to get their money back as much as 15 years without paying hard penalties. The SEC enacted the rules in 2008 to protect seniors and other investors from fraudulent and abusive practices in the sale of annuities.

International integration

During Cox's tenure, the SEC significantly expanded its international activities. Between 2005 and 2008, Cox signed regulatory arrangements covering enforcement and regulatory cooperation with the UK, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, Australia, Germany, Bulgaria and Norway. As Chair of the Committee on Technical Committee of the International Securities Commission, he leads international efforts to unify the US GAAP and International Financial Reporting Standards. In December 2007, the SEC adopted rules to allow foreign issuers to use IFRS without reconciliation to US GAAP. And in November 2008, the SEC issued a roadmap - with clear milestones along the way - that would lead to a Commission decision in early 2014 on whether a US public company should be required to use IFRS. Cox also initiated a reciprocal recognition process for foreign regulators, based on an assessment of whether securities regulatory systems in other countries produce high-quality results comparable to investors, including in law enforcement. In August 2008 he entered into an agreement with the Australian Securities and Investments Commission under which the SEC may approve an exclusion enabling Australian-registered stock exchanges to operate in the US without having to register with the SEC, and that the US exchange will have the same privileges in Australia. In 2008, the SEC was in mutual recognition discussions with regulators in Canada, and also in preliminary discussions with the European Securities Regulators Committee.

Law enforcement

International enforcement is also rising well below Cox. During 2008, the SEC made 556 foreign regulatory requests for assistance with SEC investigations, many of which were related to potential errors in the subprime market. Among the significant international cases that the Commission brought during this period were the charges that were published in 2008 against the Hong Kong-based insider trading in Dow Jones before being acquired by News Corporation. Under the Cox SEC also carries a large number of cases in its history that burden corporations and their officers with foreign bribery under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and impose criminal penalties for these cases.

Overall, enforcement is a top priority for Cox starting in 2005 and throughout its leadership. He moved quickly to settle the debate over whether it was legitimate to impose penalties on the company, adopting a policy that clarified the SEC "has not turned into a corporate-friendly place that much in the expected boardroom." In the SEC budget, in 2008, it has increased the section aimed for enforcement to the highest level in 20 years. Nevertheless, the overall SEC appropriation remained stable for two of its fiscal years, first by the Republic and then the Democratic Congress, and it increased by only 2% in the third year. The budget of this sub-inflationary agency, combined with a reasonable salary increase for staff, causes the number of enforcement personnel to decline. Critics attack the lack of SEC funds and blame Cox, though Congress and administration clearly share responsibility. When the agency budget finally increased in fiscal 2008, it increased enforcement personnel by 4%.

Beginning in his leadership he focused his efforts on institutional enforcement on stock backdating options, a forbidden practice that has been revealed after the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act changed the rules on reporting stock options grants. Under the Cox SEC investigated over 160 cases of stock backdating options, helped by the fact that the reporting form for the disclosure of stock options was first mandated in the "interactive data" format. Some of these cases are worth noting because of their size: in December 2007 the agency won $ 468 million in settlement for stock options that retreated against former Chairman and CEO of UnitedHealth Group.

Cox also aggressively uses the agency's "Dana Adil" authority to distribute funds obtained from securities brokers directly to injured investors. In February 2008, the SEC has returned more than $ 3.5 billion to disadvantaged investors, including more than $ 2 billion in 2007 alone. To speed up the refund, cut bureaucracy and lower costs, Cox created a new Office of Collections and Distribution. A few weeks later, in May 2008, the new Office began sending over $ 800 million in Fair Funds to the detriment of investors at American International Group, Inc. (AIG), which sets SEC fees for financial fraud. In 2006, the Commission obtained a $ 350 million fine from Fannie Mae after accusing the company of fraudulent accounting; his sentence was one of the greatest in the history of the Commission. The following year the Commission accused Freddie Mac of accounting fraud and regained a $ 50 million fine.

As the 2008 credit crisis spread to the city's finances, the auction-level securities market froze, leaving investors with no access to their cash. The SEC immediately investigated the largest companies in the market and entered the largest settlement in SEC history, totaling up to $ 30 billion for injured investors.

Cox also targets city securities fraud. In April 2008 the SEC accused five former San Diego city officials of fraudulent securities involving billions in an undisclosed pension obligation that has put the city and taxpayers in serious financial danger. Throughout his tenure he railed against the insufficiency of disclosure to investors in city securities, which the SEC did not regulate, and asked Congress for explicit authority for agents to do so. In December 2008, the SEC under its leadership authorized the creation of a repository that was freely accessible to the Internet for financial disclosure of the city government. "With the liquidity problems of the city-level auction securities and the downgrading of municipal bond insurers that contribute to the current credit crunch, urban market disclosure and transparency has never been more critical," he said.

At the end of December 2008, after the acknowledgment by New York investment adviser Bernard Madoff and the SEC filing against him accusing a $ 50 billion fraud, Cox stated he was "deeply concerned" that "specific and credible evidence" was given to the agency over the at least 10 years previously not referred to the Commission to initiate a formal investigation. He ordered an internal investigation by the agency's Inspector General. The report found that substantive allegations regarding Madoff were first brought to the SEC in 1992. Response

for the beginning of the 2008 US Recession.

Under his leadership, the SEC on 17 and 18 September 2008, imposed various permanent or emergency restrictions on short sales in response to the liquidity crisis. A sloppy short sale, in which the seller deliberately fails to deliver the stocks sold for a short time to completion, is strictly prohibited, the exceptions to the chosen market makers that have been for a number of years have been removed, and new anti-fraud provisions, Rule 10b- 21, was adopted to grant special enforcement authorities in such cases. In September 2008, the brief sale of 799 financial shares was temporarily suspended in response to a rumor accompanied by an increasing short selling activity in the stock of major financial institutions.

On September 26, 2008, Cox ended the 2004 program for voluntary regulation of investment bank holding companies, beginning under SEC Chairman William Donaldson and then Director of Market Regulation (later SEC Commissioner) Annette Nazareth. The program "is fundamentally flawed from the start, because investment banks can opt out or get out of voluntary supervision," Cox said. A critical report by the SEC inspector general who evaluated the program given the failure of Bear Stearns in March 2008 found that while "Bear Stearns met capital and liquidity requirements" at the time of the acquisition, "the collapse was raised, serious questions about the adequacy of this requirement." However, according to the Inspector General , his report "excludes determining the cause of the collapse of Bear Stearns" or determining "whether there is this problem that directly contributes to the collapse of Bear Stearns." Regarding to that, the report stated, "we have no evidence linking this significant deficiency to the cause of the collapse of Bear Stearns." Cox criticized the surveillance program on the grounds that due to its voluntary nature and limited SEC legal authority, the agency could not force changes in the hundreds of unregulated subsidiaries of major investment banks such as Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns as which can be done by bank regulators with the parent company of the bank. In testimony before the Congress on several occasions in 2008, he asked the legal authorities to arrange an investment bank holding company.

In addition to the fact that the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act does not give the SEC the authority to regulate the parent company of large investment banks, Cox notes that investors are vulnerable to other regulatory gaps like the fact that $ 60 trillion markets for credit. the default swap is then completely unregulated. "Neither the SEC nor the regulator has the authority even to require minimum disclosure," he said. In testimony and public statements he urged Congress to enact improvement legislation.

Cox said that during the buildup of the credit crunch, when credit rating agencies are still unregulated, they provide the best credit ratings for financial instruments that bundle risky loans and spread the negative impact of the credit crunch more widely across the market. Following the first SEC registration of the credit rating agency in September 2007 under the newly enacted legislative authority, it ordered a 10-month examination of three major rating agencies that discovered significant weaknesses in their ranking practices for mortgage-backed securities and called into question the impartiality of their ratings. The results were reported to Congress in July 2008. The SEC immediately began drafting a law which ended on December 3, 2008 with the approval of a series of measures to regulate conflicts of interest, disclosure, internal policies, and business practices of credit rating agencies. The regulation is intended to ensure that companies provide more meaningful ratings and greater disclosure to investors about secured debt and mortgage-backed mortgage securities.

In an interview with the Washington Post at the end of December 2008, Cox said, "What we have done in the current chaos is to remain calm, which has been our biggest contribution - not impulsive, but through a highly professional and orderly process that takes into account undesirable consequences and gives broad notifications to market participants. "Cox added that the Commission's decision to impose a three-week ban on short-selling financial stocks was taken reluctantly, but the view at the time that includes Finance Minister Henry M. Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, is that "if we do not act and act at that moment, these financial institutions could fail as a result and there will be nothing left to save." In an interview in December 2008 with Reuters, he explained that the SEC Economic Analysis Office still evaluating data from temporary bans, and that preliminary findings suggest some undesirable market consequences and side effects. "While the true effect of this temporary measure will not be fully understood for several more months, if not years... knowing what we know now, I believe in the balance of the Commission will not do it again."

Cox resigned as Chair of the SEC at the end of the Bush administration, on January 20, 2009.

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Current career

After his tenure at the SEC and a 24-year career in an elected and designated office that includes services in the legislative, executive and judicial branches of the US government, Cox returns to his home in Southern California and legal practice, which has once been a pre-Washington profession. He joins the Boston-based international law firm Bingham McCutchen LLP as a partner in Corporate practice, M & A and Company securities, resides in the Orange County office, where in 2014 Best Lawyers in America named him Lawyers of the Year in the Corporate Governance category. He also serves as president of Bingham Consulting LLC, the company's global strategic consulting business. Since the combination of Bingham in November 2014 and the international law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, Cox has been a partner of Morgan Lewis and president of Morgan Lewis Consulting LLC. Other new members from Morgan Lewis Consulting include former Arizona Diamondbacks and San Diego Padres owner Jeff Moorad, former New Hampshire Governor Steve Merrill, former California Governor and US Senator Pete Wilson, former Clinton White House Cabinet Secretary Thurgood Marshall, Jr., and former US Ambassador to the Executive Director of the Ukrainian Presidency and George Bush, Roman Popadiuk. While at Morgan Lewis, Cox was again crowned by The Best Lawyers in America as a Lawyer of the Year in Orange County, this time in the Corporate Law category for 2016.

Cox is a member of the board of directors of ophthalmic technology RxSight, Inc., and serves as a supervisory board at the University of Southern California. He previously served on the board of directors of health care companies Alphaeon Corporation and Calhoun Vision, Inc., and photonics manufacturer Newport Corporation. He also serves on the advisory boards of Thomson Reuters Accelus, the United States Energy Security Council, and the Hydrocarbon Loker Research Institute, founded by Nobel Prize winner George A. Olah. For ten years he was a member of the board of directors of the National Endowment for Democracy, and the supervisory board of Chapman University.

In June 2014, Cox was named Father of the Year by the Father's Day Council and the American Diabetes Association in recognition of his "tremendous contribution to his family, profession, and community."

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External links

• Official Biography - SEC Site
• Christopher Cox Inaugurated as Chair of the SEC - Press Release SEC
• Appearance in C-SPAN
• President Bush Appoints Cox Congressman as Chair of the SEC - White House Press Release
• Speech and Statement as Chairman of the SEC
• Changes I've seen - Chris Cox's farewell at Orange County Register

Congress

• Biography at the Directory of Congressional Biographies of the United States
• Financial information (federal office) at the Federal Electoral Commission

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References

Source of the article : Wikipedia