It’s a good day at General Electric.
After shedding millions in assets, the company earlier this week got financial regulators off its back, ridding itself of a ‘too big to fail’ designation that indicated it was a threat to the U.S. financial system.
Alex Dimitrief, GE’s top lawyer, said he couldn’t be happier.
“This was complicated stuff,” said Dimitrief in an interview about all the legal work that went into the designation-switch.
“We knew what we needed to do and we knew what we needed to show,” said Dimitrief.
Dimitrief pointed to an outside legal team led by Rodge Cohen, of Sullivan & Cromwell, and Randall Guynn and Luigi De Ghenghi, of Davis Polk & Wardwell. They took a laboring oar in drafting a key submission to the Financial Stability Oversight Council requesting the designation change.
“It was a hard one to write,” said Dimitrief, saying that the submission ran more than 100 pages and detailed the steps GE has taken over the past year to sell many of its businesses. “It explained what we were selling and to whom and what the schedule was.”
The submission was given to the FSOC on March 30, he said.
After the FSOC in 2013 named GE Capital as one of four systemically important non-bank financial firms, the company sold many of its assets. These included businesses in vehicle-fleet financing, commercial real estate, restaurant lending and online banking.
Dimitrief said that the designation change will allow the company to embrace a different model, returning back to its roots in the industrial business.
“It’s a confirmation that GE Capital is now a smaller and less riskier component than it was before,” he said.
Dimitrief became general counsel of GE around seven months ago after its longstanding GC Brackett Denniston retired.
Dimitrief was previously the GC of GE Capital. In his new role, he oversees roughly 4,500 lawyers, compliance, environmental, health and safety professionals.
How have his first months on the job been?
So far, so good, said the former Kirkland & Ellis litigator.
“I can’t wait to get to work every day,” said Dimitrief, who called his legal team “a very efficient law firm.”
“I would put the law firm at GE up against any law firm in the world... I can’t think of a better place to be.”
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