Levitt's most recent gig, announced Thursday, will be chairing the new Governance Leadership Council created by RiskMetrics Group "to foster broad-based, visionary thinking with regard to the practice of corporate governance." Levitt said RiskMetrics has recruited "a true All-Star team" of governance experts to identify good corporate governance practices today and to "continually explore what those factors and dynamics might look like in the future."
Members of the new RiskMetrics committee include Mark Anson, president of Nuveen Investments; Peggy Foran, general counsel, Sara Lee Corp.; Charles Elson, director of the University of Delaware's Weinberg Center for Corporate Governance; John Olson, partner, Gibson Dunn & Crutcher; former SEC Commissioner Harvey Goldschmid; David Hirschmann, CEO of the U.S. Chamber's Center for Capital Markets Competitiveness; Dana Mead, chairman of MIT Corp.; James Robinson III, former American Express chairman; Reuben Mark, chairman of Colgate-Palmolive; Peter Clapman, former corporate governance head at TIAA-CREF; and Stephen Kaufman, senior lecturer at the Harvard Business School.
Meanwhile, another Levitt-led group is wrapping up work on a major report on accounting practices. With co-chair, former Treasury Department economist Donald Nicolaisen, Levitt runs an advisory committee created by U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to examine how to ensure the auditing profession is equipped to handle Sarbanes-Oxley demands.
In July, prompted by an activist fund's attack on CSX Corp., Levitt and 21 other governance experts submitted a court brief pressing the SEC to change disclosure rules to account for "synthetic derivatives."
Levitt's other post-SEC projects include serving in 2005 as a special adviser to the board of American International Group following the resignation of CEO and chairman Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, who was forced out when his firm's accounting practices were investigated by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer.
If a Sept. 1 CFO magazine piece is any indication of how these assignments pan out, Levitt might want to be careful about how many he takes on, lest he get labeled as the go-to guy for well-meaning but ultimately pointless efforts aimed at showing "top people" are addressing the crisis of the moment. - Bill McConnell
Clinton-era SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt Jr. is keeping himself quite busy as a Washington wise man.
