As Washington’s banking-policy community was focused on the first anniversary of the Dodd-Frank Act, one important player in the law’s passage was noticeably absent.
We’ll give you a hint: It wasn’t Barney Frank.
As Frank testified at a Senate Banking Committee hearing marking the occasion, the former chairman of that committee and the other half of the law’s namesake, former Sen. Chris Dodd, was nowhere to be found.
It is unclear where he was for the anniversary Thursday, but his whereabouts were spotted two days earlier. Perhaps conscious of the limits on contact between congressmen and lawmakers-turned-lobbyists, Dodd was thousands of miles away in Madrid, Spain, according to a report in Variety.com.
The Web site, which referred to Dodd as “Hollywood’s ambassador to the world,” said the former senator was “expressing his solidarity with Spain’s piracy-ravaged film industry at a Madrid meeting.”
Dodd, who now heads the Motion Picture Association of America, attended a “glitzy” gathering of senior Spanish film producers, politicos and trade body honchos, to whom Dodd spoke in Spanish “with a soft Cuban lilt,” the site said. Who knew?
