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OCC swaps heads

Chris Hamblin, Editor, London, 4 May 2017

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US Comptroller of the Currency Thomas Curry will step down from his job tomorrow, to be replaced on a temporary basis by Keith Noreika who will serve as Acting Comptroller of the Currency.

Curry is relinquishing control of a 4,000-strong team. He completed his five-year term on 9 April and plans to return home to Boston in Massachussets.

Noreika will become the acting comptroller while President Trump searches for a permanent replacement. He is a partner at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP and was a partner at the famous - though some would say infamous - firm of Covington & Burling, specialising in banking regulation. He has extensive experience advising regional, multinational, and other banks on structuring their operations, including compliance with the Volcker Rule and Consumer Financial Protection Bureau regulations, and Bank Secrecy Act and anti-money laundering rules. He has represented national banks before the Supreme Court and has worked extensively with all federal bank regulatory agencies.

Some commentators dislike Noreika's law firm, partly because of the 'revolving door' between it and the top echelons of the US Government. Professor Bill Black declared himself 'appalled' when Lennie Breuer, the head of the criminal division of the Department of Justice between April 2009 and March 2013, was, according to him, caught boasting of his love for deferred prosecution agreements in 2012 as a means of financial firms avoiding trouble. Breuer was at Covington & Burling in the nineties and is back there now.

Breitbart News levelled another broadside against the firm in January, this time in respect of its most illustrious alumnus, who rejoined in 2015: "[Eric] Holder spent nearly a decade at Covington & Burling giving counsel to the firm’s top-tier finance clients. From 2001 until he became Obama’s attorney general, Holder made more than $4.5 million in compensation at Covington & Burling. The firm’s clients included JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America – the very big banks Obama blamed for the financial collapse. Indeed, these Covington clients are also the same financial institutions against which Obama’s Holder-led DOJ failed to file a single criminal charge for their involvement in the 2008 financial crisis."

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