SEC’s Thomsen resigns; Khuzami to replace her

Securities and Exchange Commission director of enforcement Linda Thomsen is resigning to return to the private sector, the agency announced today. She will be replaced by Rob Khuzami, general counsel of the Americas in the New York office of Deutsche Bank AG of Frankfort, Germany, since 2004, according to reports. Deutsche Bank spokesman Ted Meyer would not confirm the reports. Mr. Khuzami was a federal prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office in New York for 11 years before joining Deutsche Bank in 2002, according to information supplied by the company. He was chief of the U.S. attorney’s office’s Securities and Commodities Fraud Task Force, where he supervised 40 staff members in prosecuting complex securities and white-collar criminal cases, including insider trading, accounting and financial-statement fraud, bank fraud, organized-crime infiltration of the securities markets, initial public offerings and investment adviser fraud, according to his Deutsche Bank biography. Mr. Khuzami also was a counterterrorism prosecutor with the U.S. attorney’s office. In that job, he supervised part of the investigation following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and he prosecuted the “Blind Sheik,” Omar Ahmed Ali Abdel Rahman and 13 co-defendants in connection with the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center and the assassination of Meir Kahane, the founder of the Los Angeles-based Jewish Defense League, among other terrorist acts. SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro is moving swiftly to restore the agency’s reputation after it was badly damaged by the inability to detect massive fraud allegedly perpetrated by Bernard L. Madoff Securities LLC of New York, as well as by its inability to detect problems that led to the credit crisis. She announced Friday that she is ending a two-year pilot program implemented by former SEC Chairman Christopher Cox that required enforcement staff to get permission from the commission before negotiating penalties with companies found guilty of securities fraud . Ms. Schapiro also is ending the practice of requiring investigations to be approved by all five commissioners. In addition, she on Friday named David Becker to fill the vacancy for general counsel and senior policy director, a post he held from 2000 to 2002. He most recently was a partner in the Washington office of New York law firm Cleary Gottlieb Steen & Hamilton LLP.