ROBERT A.G. MONKS


Mr. Monks is a graduate of Harvard College (magna cum laude, 1954), Cambridge University (1955), and Harvard Law School (1958; winner Ames moot court competition). He was a general partner in the Boston, Massachusetts, law firm of Goodwin & Procter. Subsequent to the full-time practice of law, he has had careers in business (CEO of C.H. Sprague & Son Company - coal and oil), investments (principal of Gardner Associates and Chairman of the Board of the Boston Company and Boston Safe Deposit & Trust Company), and state government administration (Energy Commissioner for the State of Maine, Chairman of two commissions to oversee the administration of the Maine State Retirement System appointed by Governor McKernan). Mr. Monks also has served in federal government administration as founding Trustee of the Federal Employees’ Retirement System by appointment of President Reagan, and Administrator (office is now Assistant Secretary) of the Office of Pension and Welfare Benefits Administration (Department of Labor) in charge of the private pension system in the United States.

Subsequent to his federal government service in 1985, Mr. Monks has devoted his full time and energy to the creation of a system of corporate governance in the United States. In order to accomplish this, he has been active in several different, but importantly related, spheres. He has founded four businesses which provide needed governance services:

Institutional Shareholder Services (1985) provides proxy and ownership services to institutional investors around the world. ISS has achieved the position that its recommendation is often the single deciding factor in contested proxy situations, like for example the merger of Compaq and Hewlett Packard in 2002. ISS is today a major company dominating the proxy field worldwide. Monks sold his interest in 1994 to the Thompson group. In 1999, the Thompson family sold ISS at public auction, and it was bought by a consortium organized by Mr. Monks’s son, also Robert Monks, who is today its chairman.

Subsequent to disposing of his interest in ISS, the senior Mr. Monks organized Lens Investment Management, LLC, an activist investor with several private and public partners, which functioned as an “activist investor” and over the decade of the 1990s outperformed the principal indices.

Mr. Monks also organized and still functions as Deputy Chairman of the Hermes Lens Asset Management Company in the United Kingdom which has successfully employed the same “activist investment” policy in funds in the UK and Europe.

With his long time partner, Nell Minow, Mr. Monks organized The Corporate Library, an independent information, investment and rating service which provides corporate governance data and analysis to institutional and individual investors around the world.

Mr. Monks has written and spoken about corporate governance widely. With Nell Minow, he has published Power & Accountability (Harper Collins, 1991), Watching the Watchers (Blackwell, 1996), and three editions of the standard case book, Corporate
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