Last month Allison, the former Merrill Lynch president and COO, was tapped to be chairman, president and CEO of pension fund giant TIAA-CREF, succeeding Biggs, who appeared on track to head the newly created Public Accounting Oversight Board. Then Capitol Hill politics intervened, and the reformist Biggs was ditched in favor of William Webster, a former head of both the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Central Intelligence Agency, who is perceived as more sympathetic to the accounting industry. (The Webster appointment soon became even more controversial when news leaked that SEC chairman Harvey Pitt had not disclosed to fellow commissioners the fact that Webster had served on the board of a company facing charges of fraud from shareholders.) “I am very honored to be succeeding John Biggs, who has a great record of accomplishment here at TIAA-CREF. This has been a long-planned and very well executed succession,” says Allison, 59, who has raised money for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign and run a nonprofit Internet learning venture of Oxford, Stanford and Yale’s, AllLearn.org, since leaving Merrill.
But Allison says we can expect to hear his views on corporate governance soon. “We’ve long been a responsible voice on corporate governance here at TIAA-CREF and will continue to be so,” he says. “I’m sure I’ll have more to say about that.”
