Sharon Bowles has been a member of the European Parliament for UK South East region since 2005. Following her re-election in 2009, she became Chair of the Economic and Monetary Affairs Committee. She has also been a substitute member of the Legal Affairs committee since January 2007.

During the previous mandate, Mrs Bowles´s work focused on Payment Services, Solvency II, Capital Requirements, Deposit Guarantees and Level 3 Committee funding, and on the reports on Hedge Funds and Private Equity, and Transparency of Institutional Investors. She was also rapporteur for the report on tax fraud, and for the setting up of the Statistical Governance Advisory Board.

As Chair of ECON, Mrs Bowles presides over each Committee meeting, as well as the trilogue negotiations between Parliament, Council and the Commission, and she is currently the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe) group´s shadow rapporteur on CRD4 (capital requirements), PRIPs (retail investment) and CSDs (central securities depositaries).

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.

Ms Bowles has a scientific and mathematical background having completed her doctorate at Oxford University. She later trained and worked as a Chartered and European Patent Attorney setting up her own practice in 1981.