About Martin W. McCormack

Martin W. McCormack 

St Augustine DC Scholarship High School 

BA Fordham University 

JD Fordham School of Law

Admitted to practice in the Courts of New York and before the United States Supreme Court.  After some years in private practice, Mr. McCormack’s law career moved toward an international clientele beginning with his representation of Societe Generale and its affiliate in NY, Hudson Trading and Investing Company. He was then appointed Deputy General Counsel and Board Secretary of European American Bank and EA Banking Corp when Societe Generale joined the European consortium which controlled both EA Bank and EA Banking Corporation. In these capacities he functioned as legal advisor to all American offices of the companies and as the U.S. legal liaison with the European bank shareholders of the companies’ main holding company. 

Mr. McCormack was an active representative of the EA Group upon its acquisition of the Franklin National Bank. He joined Marine Midland Bank (a unit of HSBC) as International Counsel and Assistant General Counsel where he organized the startup of a Law Department in New York City tending to the transactional, regulatory and legislative needs of the Group in New York, London, Paris, Grand Cayman, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong and Latin America. In this capacity he advised the senior credit committees and other committees of the bank on legal and enforcement issues as well as serving as Secretary of the Boards of many of their international subsidiaries and rendering them policy and legal advise mostly related to planning and problem-solving. 

Mr. McCormack was recruited to become General Counsel of Chevy Chase, FSB, the largest financial institution in the Washington, DC area and its mortgage company subsidiary. In this capacity he initiated a resident law function working closely with senior management on real estate issues involving major developers in the D.C., Md. and Northern Virginia area supervising litigation, credit and mortgage transactional and enforcement documentation and bankruptcy and insolvency matters After his semi-retirement he served for several years as a consultant to USAID, the World Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development advising many newly independent states which had been provinces of the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslav Republic during most of the twentieth century. His work, performed at the invitation of the Governments of these newly minted countries, entailed working closely with their Ministries, Central Banks and Parliaments to help them forge reforms with an eye toward transition and development away from statism and autocracy and toward free markets and independent institutions, in particular judicial systems and central banks. He drafted new laws in these countries most of which were enacted sooner or later. He was a major participant in the privatization of many of the large commercial banks in these countries which had for decades been loss-making, socialist, and corrupt government institutions. He worked closely with senior Government officials, Parliamentarians and both American and European donor institutions in these new republics teaching and organizing seminars on governance, political science, securities and banking regulation, judicial training and other reform legislation to de-sovietize the financial sectors and government agencies of these fledgling republics. These client-countries included Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Croatia.     

Mr. McCormack also lived for for more than a year in East Africa working on economic, legal, securities and bank supervision reform and teaching corporate governance to senior officials and lawyers of the Central Banks and Capital Markets Authorities and Securities Ministries in Cairo, Dar Es Sallam and Mwanza,Tanzania and Kampala, Uganda as well as The Windward Islands of the Caribbean.  He delivered an advisory paper to the Kingdom of Bhutan with recommendations for a new Negotiable Instruments Law based on Indian (British) and U.S. models. 

Mr. McCormack speaks excellent French, passable Spanish and has a good working knowledge of written and spoken Russian. He holds passports from both the United States and the European Union.”  Recently, Mr. McCormack was appointed as an Adjunct Professor of Writing and Composition on the Faculty of Iona College, New Rochelle, New York.