Michael Oxley, the former chairman of the House Financial Services Committee who co-sponsored the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, has joined the International Advisory Council of APCO Worldwide, a consultancy that specializes in corporate communications.
Oxley has been hired to provide strategic advice to APCO's clients on corporate governance, financial transactions, export and trade promotion, and government oversight and investigations.
"As global markets intertwine, questions of corporate responsibility and governance become more complex - and more important," he said in a statement.
Oxley currently works for the Government Policy Group at the law firm of Baker Hostetler. Before that, he spent 25 years in Congress. In 1995, he was named chairman of the Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Commerce, Trade and Hazardous Materials. While there, he pressed for stock prices to be quoted in dollars and cents instead of fractionally. As vice chairman of the Subcommittee on Telecommunications, Oxley helped establish the spectrum auction that sold off parts of the radio spectrum to private industry, raising $16.5 billion for the U.S. Treasury.
In January 2001 the Ohio Republican was chosen by the House leadership to chair the Financial Services Committee, which superseded the Banking Committee. A former FBI agent, Oxley was elected to the Ohio General Assembly in 1972 and represented the 82nd District until July 1981, when he began his tenure in Congress after a special election to fill the vacancy caused by the death of Tennyson Guyer. He moved to Ohio after working for the FBI in New York and Boston.
