Deven Sharma

Standard & Poor’s President Deven Sharma, who  was at the forefront of  the credit rating agency's decision to downgrade the US long-term sovereign credit rating from the top-notch 'AAA' level, will step down from his post  and work on the company's strategic portfolio review before leaving the company  by the year-end.Though S&P said the resignation is not related to the US downgrade and that it began a search for a new president  after the company split S&P into two separate organisations at the end of last year, the rating agency has been under fire from lawmakers, market players and the US Treasury Department.And the ratings agency  unprecedented move came under the leadership of Jharkhand-born Deven Sharma, who sudied in Jamshedpur and Ranchi, and then moved to the US for his masters degree at Wisconsin and his doctoral degree in management from Ohio in 198os.[caption id="attachment_66887" align="alignleft" width="380" caption="Deven Sharma, former President S&P"][/caption]When the US administration took up cudgels against the ratings agency, terming its analysis flawed and questioning its credibility and integrity, Sharma again led from the front in defending S&P’s move. Defending S&P’s action, Sharma said the angry reaction from the US was on expected lines and “the same you would get from any other country or company” being downgraded.Sharma began his career in the manufacturing sector , working with Dresser Industries and Anderson Strathclyde. In 1988, he joined Booz, Allen & Hamilton, a global management consulting firm, where he worked for 14 years. In 2002, he joined The McGraw-Hill Cos, the parent of S&P.In 2007, when the sub-prime crisis in the US housing sector was getting out of hand, and credit rating agencies were termed as perpetrators of the meltdown for their flawed ratings models of housing loans, Deven Sharma was elected president of S&P. He had joined S&P as vice-president and promoted a year later. Sharma’s promotion was taken as an indication that S&P would continue to emphasize growing its business outside the US.Sharma is part of an expanding league of Indian-origin persons heading global financial institutions. Incidentally, another India-born executive Vikram Pandit was at the helm of efforts to steer global banking giant Citigroup out of the financial crisis of 2008. Recently, another Indian-origin banker, Anshu Jain, was appointed co-CEO of German banking major Deutsche Bank.Sharma serves on the boards of   Crisil, the US-China Business Counciland Asia Society Business Council.