Byron Stephen Georgiou is an American financial lawyer, investor and political activist. In 2009 he was appointed to the US

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) was a ten-member commission appointed by the leaders of the United States Congress with the goal of investigating the causes of the financial crisis of 2007–2008. The Commission has been nicknamed t ...

(FCIC) and he was a candidate for the US Senate from Nevada in 2011.

Education

Georgiou received his undergraduate degree from

Stanford University Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...

in 1970, attending on a full academic scholarship, and his JD in 1974 from

Harvard Law School Harvard Law School (Harvard Law or HLS) is the law school of Harvard University, a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest continuously operating law school in the United States. Each class ...

Career

Georgiou worked on behalf of farmworkers via the

California Agricultural Labor Relations Board The Agricultural Labor Relations Board (ALRB) is an agency of the California state government that administers the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act, which establishes collective bargaining for farmworkers in the state.Hurt, R. Douglas ...

in the late 1970s, and as a counselor to

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

Governor

Jerry Brown Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. (born April 7, 1938) is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 34th and 39th governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and 2011 to 2019. A member of the Democratic Party, he was elected Secretary of S ...

in the early 1980s before going into private practice in

San Diego San Diego ( , ; ) is a city on the Pacific Ocean coast of Southern California located immediately adjacent to the Mexico–United States border. With a 2020 population of 1,386,932, it is the List of United States cities by population, eigh ...

(1983–94).!"Bio from Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission"
/ref> In 2009 he was “of counsel” with the law firm Coughlin Stoia Geller Rudman and Robbins, LLPCoolican, J. Patrick
"Enron foe to aid in study of financial collapse"
''Las Vegas Sun'', July 27, 2009. Retrieved 2010-07-01. and related San Diego firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP.''rgrdlaw.com/attorneys/Byron-S-Georgiou.html'', Byron Georgiou bio page. No longer available at 2015-07-28. Georgiou "helped lead a team of 30 lawyers to recover $7.5 billion for investors bilked in the Enron fiasco." With Coughlin Stoia and Robbins Geller since 2000, he has had a "leadership role" in the litigations prosecuting financial fraud on behalf of defrauded investors at Enron,

WorldCom MCI, Inc. (subsequently Worldcom and MCI WorldCom) was a telecommunications company. For a time, it was the second largest long-distance telephone company in the United States, after AT&T. Worldcom grew largely by acquiring other telecommunic ...

Dynegy Dynegy Inc. is an electric company based in Houston, Texas, in the United States. It owns and operates a number of power stations in the U.S., all of which are natural gas-fueled or coal-fueled. Dynegy was acquired by Vistra Corp on April 9, 20 ...

AOL Time Warner Warner Media, LLC ( traded as WarnerMedia) was an American multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate. It was headquartered at the 30 Hudson Yards complex in New York City, United States. It was originally established in 1972 by ...

, and

UnitedHealth UnitedHealth Group Incorporated is an American multinational managed healthcare and insurance company based in Minnetonka, Minnesota. It offers health care products and insurance services. UnitedHealth Group is the world's seventh largest c ...

. He is currently president of Georgiou Enterprises, which has wide-ranging interests including partnerships in several private equity firms; a portfolio of carbon emission reduction projects in

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

that generate

carbon credits A carbon credit is a generic term for any tradable certificate or permit representing the right to emit a set amount of carbon dioxide or the equivalent amount of a different greenhouse gas (tCO2e). Carbon credits and carbon markets are a compo ...

under the

Kyoto protocol The Kyoto Protocol was an international treaty which extended the 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) that commits state parties to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, based on the scientific consensus that (part ...

; environmental cleanup of deep

coal mining Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

sites; residential and commercial real estate and

golf course A golf course is the grounds on which the sport of golf is played. It consists of a series of holes, each consisting of a tee box, a fairway, the rough and other hazards, and a green with a cylindrical hole in the ground, known as a "cup". Th ...

management and development; and the provision of customer services at regional shopping centers throughout America. He also serves on the advisory board of

corporate governance Corporate governance is defined, described or delineated in diverse ways, depending on the writer's purpose. Writers focused on a disciplinary interest or context (such as accounting, finance, law, or management) often adopt narrow definitions th ...

program and contributes to its blog.

Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

Georgiou was one of three appointees by

United States Senate The United States Senate is the upper chamber of the United States Congress, with the House of Representatives being the lower chamber. Together they compose the national bicameral legislature of the United States. The composition and pow ...

Majority Leader

Harry Reid Harry Mason Reid Jr. (; December 2, 1939 – December 28, 2021) was an American lawyer and politician who served as a United States senator from Nevada from 1987 to 2017. He led the Senate Democratic Caucus from 2005 to 2017 and was the Sena ...

to the FCIC along with fellow Nevada resident

Heather Murren Heather Miller (formerly Murren, born May 30, 1966) is an American businesswoman. She is a private investor, former Wall Street securities analyst. She served as a Congressional appointed commissioner on the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission in ...

and Sen.

Bob Graham Daniel Robert "Bob" Graham (born November 9, 1936) is an American lawyer, author, and politician who served as the 38th governor of Florida from 1979 to 1987 and a United States senator from Florida from 1987 to 2005. He is a member of the Dem ...

, (D- FL). At the time of Georgiou's appointment to the commission, concerns were raised about

conflict of interest A conflict of interest (COI) is a situation in which a person or organization is involved in multiple interests, financial or otherwise, and serving one interest could involve working against another. Typically, this relates to situations i ...

question, pointing to Coughlin Stoia lawsuits against big

Wall Street Wall Street is an eight-block-long street in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. It runs between Broadway in the west to South Street and the East River in the east. The term "Wall Street" has become a metonym for t ...

firms. A report at the time said Georgiou had no equity in the firm and no financial stake in the lawsuits.

Lucian Bebchuk Lucian Arye Bebchuk (born 1955) is a professor at Harvard Law School focusing on economics and finance. Bebchuck has a B.A. in mathematics and economics from the University of Haifa (1977), an LL.B. from the University of Tel Aviv (1979), an LL.M. ...

, who runs the Harvard Law corporate governance program and consulted with Georgiou on the financial-fraud issues, said Georgiou brought "a rich experience and broad perspective" to the commission assignment, at the same time. In the opening FCIC session in September, 2009, "Commissioner Georgiou highlighted the importance of untangling the '

too big to fail "Too big to fail" (TBTF) and "too big to jail" is a theory in banking and finance that asserts that certain corporations, particularly financial institutions, are so large and so interconnected that their failure would be disastrous to the great ...

' phenomenon. He emphasized that the Commission should probe the role played by financial instruments and policies which allowed the creators of securities to abandon responsibility for the ultimate performance or failure of assets."

House Campaign California

In 1990 he ran for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the Democratic primary he was defeated by incumbent Jim Bates 63% to 37%.

Senate campaign Nevada

In March 2011, Georgiou officially entered the race for the U.S. Senate in Nevada, claiming he had received "significant encouragement to run both at a local and national level." He was the first Democrat to file his candidacy for the seat, which opened upon the announced retirement of Republican incumbent

John Ensign John Eric Ensign (born March 25, 1958) is an American veterinarian and former politician from Nevada. A member of the Republican Party, Ensign was a Congressman and United States Senator from Nevada; he served in the latter seat from January 200 ...

. On August 8, 2011, Georgiou ended his campaign, saying that he could "more effectively contribute to resolution of the serious economic issues facing our state and nation" through his work in the private sector than in the Senate.

Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles, Inc.

In 2015, Georgiou was serving as CEO and Chairperson of the Board of Xtreme Green Electric Vehicles, Inc. in Las Vegas.Elliott, Daryl
"Xtreme Green EVs For Police, Security, Military, Farming, & Mining Industries"
''CleanTechnica'', January 31, 2015. Retrieved 2015-07-28.

Personal life

Georgiou has lived in the

Las Vegas Valley The Las Vegas Valley is a major metropolitan area in the Southern Nevada, southern part of the U.S. state of Nevada, and the second largest in the Southwestern United States. The state's largest urban agglomeration, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Stat ...

since 2005 with his wife, Dr. Thérèse Collins. The couple has three daughters.

References

External links

Byron Georgiou's website
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Georgiou, Byron American lawyers American activists Living people Harvard Law School alumni Stanford University alumni Nevada Democrats Place of birth missing (living people) Year of birth missing (living people) People from Las Vegas