Harvey Pitt may have taken a fair amount of flak from the press over his personal business dealings in the past, but in his speech to the American Bar Association’s (ABA’s) annual general meeting in August, the chair of the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) left his audience under no illusions about his attitude towards white-collar crime.
With corporate America suffering the greatest crisis of confidence since the 1930s following a wave of corporate scandals, Pitt was not about to let the legal profession believe its role in the disaster had gone unremarked.
“Confidence in our capital markets cannot be maintained if the public believes that corporate leaders, their advisers and their cohorts are ‘gaming’ the system and focusing principally, if not exclusively, on their own personal gain,” he said. “We must reassure investors that after the string of recent scandals such abuses are not – and will not be allowed to become – the norm in American business.”
