Senate sets SEC vote, Cox foes seek delay

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The Senate Banking Committee said it
would vote on Thursday morning on the nomination of Rep.
Christopher Cox to become chairman of the U.S. Securities and
Exchange Commission.

The panel is expected to approve Cox’s nomination, said
congressional aides, with a favorable vote sending the
California Republican’s name to the floor of the full Senate
for final consideration.

Cox went answered questions before the committee on
Tuesday. The scheduling of a committee vote for just two days
later came as opponents of Cox, who are fearful the free-market
conservative would oversee a regulatory rollback, urged the
committee to ask him more questions.

The Foundation for Taxpayer and Consumer Rights — a group
that has previously worked with the former high-profile
plaintiffs’ law firm Milberg Weiss — on Wednesday accused Cox
of “potential perjury.”

The group said Cox’s testimony “omitted important facts
about the extent of his involvement with a web of companies
that perpetrated a $130 million fraud on small investors.”

At the confirmation hearing, committee Chairman Sen.
Richard Shelby and senior Democrat Sen. Paul Sarbanes asked Cox
about his work in the 1980s as a private lawyer for First
Pension Corp., a former pension-funds administrator.

A Cox spokesman referred questions to the White House, ,
where a spokeswoman said Cox had adequately answered questions
about First Pension at the hearing.

“This matter concerns work congressman Cox did in private
practice decades ago. It was fully looked into in court
proceedings and congressman Cox won the case. The court
dismissed all causes of action against him,” the White House
spokeswoman said.

The SEC charged First Pension and three officers with fraud
in May 1994. Former First Pension owner William Cooper pleaded
guilty in August 1994 to criminal fraud charges. In the early
1980s, Cox did legal work for First Pension when he was working
at law firm Latham & Watkins. Cox was elected to Congress in
1988.

Cox has said he did preliminary work on a securities
offering for a First Pension affiliate. The work was not
involved in the criminal case against Cooper, he said at his
confirmation hearing on Tuesday.

A court also dismissed Cox as a defendant in a later
shareholder class-action lawsuit over the First Pension
scandal. “The court dismissed all of the claims against me in
that lawsuit,” Cox told the committee.

Cox would take over the SEC from William Donaldson, who
quit as chairman on June 30 after two years on the job.

Cox has been strongly endorsed by Republicans and
securities industry groups eager to loosen SEC rules adopted in
the wake of corporate scandals such as the Enron Corp. collapse
in 2001.

Democrats, unions and investor activists, concerned about
the possibility of looser rules, have opposed the nomination.

Plaintiffs’ law firms — such as the former Milberg Weiss,
which recently split into two firms — have been persistent
foes of Cox. In 1995, Congress passed a law he wrote that made
it more difficult to sue corporations for fraud.

The banking committee is also scheduled to vote on Thursday
on two Democratic SEC nominations: renewal of incumbent SEC
Commissioner Roel Campos and Annette Nazareth, now director of
the commission’s Market Regulation division.