The Securities and Exchange Commission said Tuesday that it has hired former federal prosecutor George S. Canellos as the new director of its Manhattan regional office.
SEC Chairman Mary Schapiro's selection of a former federal prosecutor to lead the office that handles many of the enforcement cases and examinations of big Wall Street firms comes as no surprise. Earlier this year she hired former federal prosecutor Robert Khuzami to serve as the enforcement division's new director, partly as a way to help restore investor confidence after the agency's failure to detect Bernard Madoff's Ponzi scheme.
Canellos, like Khuzami, worked in the U.S. Attorney's Office in New York's Southern District between 1994 and 2002. He was a chief of the major crimes unit, which was responsible for investigating large-scale financial crimes like bank, insurance and tax fraud. He also served as a senior trial attorney for the office's Securities and Commodities Task Force.
