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Sharon Bowles

Sharon Bowles

Member of European Parliament, Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee.

Sharon Bowles has been a member of the European Parliament since 2005. Following her re-election in 2009, she became Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. She is a substitute member of the Legal Affairs committee and of the Special Committee on the Financial, Economic and Social Crisis.

During the past Parliament she was the shadow rapporteur for the directives on Payment Services, Solvency II, Capital Requirements, Deposit Guarantees and Level 3 Committee funding, and for reports on Hedge Funds and Private Equity and Transparency of Institutional Investors. She was also rapporteur on tax fraud and for the setting up of the Statistical Governance Advisory Board. The ECON Committee is currently very busy amending and approving the EU's many legislative proposals in response to the financial and economic crisis, notably more effective regulation of European banks and greater financial supervision of the banking, insurance and securities sectors, for example the European Market Infrastructure Regulation (EMIR), short-selling, financial conglomerates, as well as the economic governance package.

Ms. Bowles became active in politics in the mid 1980s. During the period from 1997 to 2005 she served on the Federal Executive Board of the Liberal Democrats, where she chaired the International Relations Committee, she was a Vice-President of Liberal International, and Vice-President of the ELDR aisbl (European Liberal Democrat and Reform party). Ms. Bowles was a UK parliamentary candidate for the Liberal Democrats in 1992 and 1997, and also a European parliamentary candidate in 1994, 1999, 2004 and 2009.

Before joining the European Parliament, Ms. Bowles worked as a European patent attorney between 1981 and 2005.

Sharon Bowles graduated from Reading University in Chemical Physics with Mathematics. She moved on to do research on semiconductors at Oxford University, and later became a Chartered European Patent Attorney in 1981.

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