Obama to nominate ex-US Attorney to head SEC

3 hrs.

NBC News staff and wire reports

President Barack Obama is?expected Thursday to nominate former U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White to lead the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would bring a proven prosecutor of white-collar crimes into an agency that has been criticized for being soft on Wall Street.

A White House official told CNBC that the president will nominate White and renominate Richard Cordray to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which was created in the wake of the financial crisis as part of the Dodd-Frank Act to reform Wall Street.

A personnel announcement is expected to come at 2:30 p.m. EST, a separate White House statement said.?

White spent nearly a decade as the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, building a reputation as a tough prosecutor with an expertise in pursuing white collar crimes and complex securities and financial fraud cases. White House officials say that experience makes her well positioned to implement Obama's Wall Street reform legislation.Capitol Hill.

White, 65, currently heads the litigation department at law firm Debevoise & Plimpton.

She was the first woman to hold the position of U.S. attorney in Manhattan, one of the most prestigious positions in federal law enforcement. During her tenure from 1993 to 2002, White won convictions of white-collar criminals, drug traffickers and international terrorists. The most notable was Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.

She also led the prosecution of mob boss John Gotti when she was acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn in 1992. Gotti died in prison in 2002.

If confirmed by the Senate, White would be the first prosecutor to head the 79-year-old SEC. Most SEC chairmen traditionally have come from Wall Street or the ranks of private securities lawyers. The choice of White is likely intended to bolster the agency's enforcement profile in the aftermath of the financial crisis.

White's background differs sharply from Schapiro, who stepped down last month after guiding the agency in the four years after the crisis. Schapiro worked at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the securities industry's self-policing organization. Some consumer advocates have said that Schapiro's experience as CEO of FINRA made her more likely to seek compromises and less likely to aggressively pursue misconduct.

During Shapiro's tenure, the SEC reached major settlements with the biggest banks on Wall Street, including Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase and Citibank. But critics said the penalties were small compared with the banks' revenues. And they complained that no senior executives were held accountable.

White would be expected to give high priority to expanding the enforcement efforts.

At the same time, much of the pressing work facing the agency involves writing new rules. The SEC is seeking stricter rules for money-market mutual funds and must get into shape the so-called Volcker Rule, which would bar banks from making certain trades for their own profit.

As head of the litigators at Debevoise & Plimpton, White has represented a number of financial institutions likely to have crossed swords with the SEC in enforcement cases. Her clients also included former Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis, whom she represented in a 2010 civil lawsuit by then-New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo accusing Lewis of misleading shareholders in the bank's merger with Merrill Lynch.

White also represented the largest U.S. hospital chain, HCA, in the insider-trading investigations by the SEC and the Justice Department of former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, whose family owned HCA. The investigations were closed in 2007 with no charges filed against Frist.?

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.?

Source: http://www.nbcnews.com/business/obama-nominate-ex-us-attorney-white-new-sec-chief-1C8086505

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