Recently, the Caux Round Table (CRT) appointed five new fellows. I would like to welcome them and give you their backgrounds. CRT fellows graciously volunteer to advise and consult with the CRT’s leadership to provide the best thinking on capitalism, its prospects and shortcomings. They bring to our attention new developments and opportunities for collaboration and outreach.
Eraj Weerasinghe
Eraj Weerasinghe has distinguished himself in the field of valuation, which is of great interest to the CRT in re-conceptualizing the asset value of companies to include social and human capitals. Eraj has worked on valuation for Duff & Phelps and Ernst & Young. He is now with Duff & Phelps in San Francisco, responsible for leading a valuation team with a global focus on the oil and gas, infrastructure and mining sectors.
From September 2014 to December 2019, he was in London with Ernst & Young as Associate Partner in valuations modelling and economics where he led a revenue business providing deal pricing and valuation advice to major institutional investors (Canadian and Australian pension investors) in energy infrastructure and oil and gas corporates.
Eraj has global experience in valuing investments across the infrastructure spectrum, including social infrastructure, regulated businesses, contracted assets, throughput infrastructure assets and infrastructure related businesses. He has provided deal pricing and valuations advice globally across the oil and gas value chain, from upstream exploration and production through mid-stream transportation and downstream, including refining, wholesale and retail marketing and trading of oil products, including LPG and oil field services. He is a regular speaker on valuation matters in oil, gas and energy infrastructure.
Eraj’s credentials include Charter Financial Analyst, Chartered Surveyor and member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors. He studied law at the College of Law in London and received a B.S. and M.Sc. from the London School of Economics.
Gaurav Vasisht
Gaurav Vasisht joined the Volcker Alliance, established by the late Paul Volcker, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve, in 2014 as Senior Vice President and Director of the financial regulation program. In this role, Gaurav advised Mr. Volcker and worked closely with numerous Volcker Alliance board members on financial regulatory matters. He also leads the development of regulatory reform proposals and promotes the Alliance’s policy priorities before the federal government, including the Senate Committee on Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs, the House Financial Services Committee and an array of financial regulatory agencies.
At the Alliance, Gaurav has led the development and drafting of several reports and working papers, including Unfinished Business: Banking in the Shadows, a comprehensive financial reform proposal hailed by former Vice President Joe Biden as “a blueprint on how to make the financial system safer.” Gaurav also contributed to the brief amicus curiae of Ben Bernanke and Paul Volcker in support of defendant-appellant in MetLife, Inc. v. Financial Stability Oversight Council. He has testified before Congress on financial stability matters and presented before the G20’s Financial Stability Board on the effectiveness of too-big-to-fail reforms. Gaurav was Chairman Volcker’s liaison to the Systemic Risk Council, a private sector, non-partisan body of experts committed to addressing regulatory and structural issues relating to global systemic risk.
Prior to joining the Volcker Alliance, Gaurav spent a decade in New York State’s government. Most recently, he served as Executive Deputy Superintendent of the NYS Department of Financial Services (DFS), heading the agency’s 300-employee banking division. In this role, he supervised all state-chartered depository institutions, most of the U.S.-based branches, agencies and representative offices of foreign banking organizations and all of New York’s mortgage bankers, brokers, servicers, money transmitters and finance companies. Gaurav also co-directed DFS’s anti-money laundering and international sanctions enforcement initiative, assisted in the supervision of independent monitors required under agency enforcement actions and vetted the applications of emerging financial technology companies for licensure under NYS banking law.
Gaurav is co-author of What Makes a Regulator Excellent?, a book edited by the University of Pennsylvania Law School and published by the Brookings Institution Press.
A graduate of New York University and St. John’s University School of Law, Gaurav has worked on pioneering initiatives discussed in leading law and policy textbooks and covered in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times.
He has been a Non-Resident Fellow at the Global Financial Markets Center at Duke University Law School, is a Contributor to Penn Law’s Regulatory Review and has guest lectured at law and business schools across the U.S., including Baruch, Duke, Georgetown, Penn, Vanderbilt and the University of California, Hastings.
Michael Wright
Michael Wright has spent most of his career as a senior executive and strategist in high technology which allowed him to pervade most industries and most cultures of the developed world. That experience includes both line and staff and includes all management levels, from product to functional, to c-suite to public boards. He is fortunate to be one of few senior executives who has expertise in both operations and strategy, as well as in governance and organizational architecture on a global scale.
He has raised millions for startups and publicly traded entities and been entrusted with the assets of nascent to large-cap global technology companies and been a successful entrepreneur. He has also lived management responsibilities from venture capital to public ownership and championed product and process development along with growing intangible assets. Michael developed and promoted strategic leadership training, innovation and high-speed transitions on the path to building high performance teams. And luckily, he had the foresight to build robust, future oriented, capacity in information technology and knowledge management, the basis for global competition in the 4th industrial revolution and exponential era.
He led successful startups to exits, including his own (WWK.com) and others, including August Technologies and Entegris.
His business strengths are the experiences and energy enabling him to encourage, mentor, connect and energize the entrepreneurial engine required to build out innovative ecosystems that can be quickly and robustly developed in the exponential era.
Michael is also a writer with over 40 published articles focused on the interaction of business and technology with human behaviors, values and belief systems.
Michael Hartoonian
Michael Hartoonian is a former Scholar-in-Residence at Hamline University and Professor and Director of the Institute for Democratic Capitalism in the (then) Department of Educational Policy and Administration in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota. His research interests are in ethics, education and economics and their integration in a democratic republic, as well as identifying democratic value tensions in American history and contemporary life.
Michael received his B.A. degree in economics from Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and his M.A., in history and education from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. His Ph.D., also from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, is in curriculum and instruction-history and social sciences and administration. In 1992, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters from Ripon College, in Ripon, Wisconsin and in 2000, he received the Lucia R. Briggs Distinguished Achievement Award from Lawrence University.
Michael continues to write, lecture and consult in education, business and government throughout the U.S., Central America, Asia, the Middle East and Europe. His experiences include being a classroom teacher, state (Wisconsin) content supervisor (social studies), school administrator and policy advisor for Wisconsin’s State Superintendent. He has been a Fulbright Scholar (Africa), member of the National (Humanities) Faculty, Director of the Danforth International Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin, Madison and Co-Coordinator of the Wisconsin Geographic Alliance. In 1995 and 1996, he served as President of the National Council for the Social Studies.
He has authored over seventy articles in such journals as the Kappan, Social Education, Theory and Research in Social Education, Pacific-Asian Education, The Social Studies, The Biological Sciences Study Journal, the Wisconsin Academy Review, The Good Society and has authored and contributed to several books on social studies education, U.S. history, international and global relations, curriculum integration, teacher education, the development of thinking and reasoning in children, democratic capitalism, civic virtue and citizenship. He is lead author of the book The Idea of America: How Values Shaped Our Republic and Hold the Key to Our Future. His newest book is Chased by the Memory: A Boy’s Struggle for Identity.
Isabella Bunn
Isabella Bunn is an international lawyer and policy advisor with a transatlantic background as corporate counsel, trade and investment director and endowed professor of business ethics.
Based at the University of Oxford, she is Research Fellow in Governance and Global Ethics at Regent’s Park College, Associate Director of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Culture and Trustee of the Oxford Peace Research Trust. Isabella serves on the International Advisory Council of Oxford Analytica, a geopolitical consulting firm and as Senior Advisor to its Foundation.
Isabella’s academic background includes a B.S. in foreign service from Georgetown University, an M.A. in international relations and J.D., cum laude, from the University of San Diego, a M.Phil. in theology from the University of Oxford and a Ph.D. in human rights law from the University of Bristol. Her current research interests relate to corporate governance and values, business responsibility for human rights and sustainable development and justice in the global economy. At the British Academy, she is a member of the Corporate Advisory Group for the Future of the Corporation program. She is a contributor to the Human-Centered Business Model project, which originated with the World Bank’s Global Forum on Law, Justice and Development and is now based at the OECD Development Centre. She is also engaged with the U.N. Global Compact, notably the Action Platform for Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions.
Isabella has held several leadership appointments with the American Bar Association (ABA), including as Chair of the Advisory Council for the ABA Center for Human Rights, Council Member of the ABA Section of International Law and International Co-Chair of the Fellows of the ABA. In 2018, she was designated as one of the ABA representatives to the United Nations. Additional roles include a member of the Founding Executive Council of the Society of International Economic Law, member of the board of the Internet Bar Organization and member of the Council of Advisors of the Washington Institute for Business, Government & Society.