Peter York Solmssen is an American lawyer and business executive who served as general counsel of Siemens AG, the German engineering company, until November 2013. Solmssen was Siemens' general counsel and assumed responsibility for the company's businesses in North and South America. Solmssen was best known at Siemens for having negotiated simultaneous settlements of the Siemens corruption prosecutions and leading a global campaign against bribery.
After his clerkship, Solmssen joined the law firm Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll as an associate. His first assignment was on the defense team advising the Dan River Corporation which was resisting a hostile, all-cash tender offer from companies controlled by Carl Icahn. Solmssen was part of the team that devised a successful defense, based on a novel application of the Investment Company Act of 1940. Solmssen was so impressed by the Investment Company Act lawyers at Ballard that he asked to be transferred from the Ballard litigation department to the ´40 Act department, led by William Nutt and William Rheiner. It was a time of explosive growth in the mutual fund industry, and Ballard was a leading law firm in that practice. Ballard had a small office in Frankfurt, Germany, and the partner in charge soon discovered that Solmssen spoke German. He solicited Solmssen to spend some time in the Frankfurt office, covering for the resident lawyer while he was on holiday. Solmssen became more and more involved in the transnational corporate practice, until he was running a growing German companies practice. Solmssen was elected a partner of Ballard, Spahr, Andrews & Ingersoll in 1988 with his wife, the first married lawyers to be elected partners at Ballard.
Morgan, Lewis & Bockius
In 1989, the Philadelphia law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius became one of the first major U.S. firms to open an office in West Germany. The firm recruited Solmssen from Ballard at that time to run its Frankfurt office.
General Electric
, one of his clients, hired Solmssen in 1998 as corporate vice president and general counsel of GE Plastics. In 2002 Solmssen became general counsel of GE Healthcare. While there he helped negotiate the company's acquisitions of Instrumentarium OY and Amersham plc and others. He also initiated ground-breaking collective action in the diagnostic imaging industry which culminated in the NEMA Code. Under the NEMA Code sales and marketing practices which could have been considered suspect under the anti-kickback laws of many countries were ended or sharply curtailed.
Siemens
In the summer of 2007 Solmssen became general counsel and managing board member of Siemens AG. Peter Solmssen was the first American to serve on the Siemens board. Siemens was in the early stages of a corruption scandal which had commenced in Munich and quickly spread to other countries, endangering the company's survival. In May 2007 the company had replaced its CEO with the first outsider in its history, Peter Löscher, who had been a senior executive at Amersham. Solmssen and Löscher knew each other from working together at GE. Löscher's first priority was cleaning up the corruption scandal and asked Solmssen to lead that effort. As the new general counsel at Siemens, Mr Solmssen faced the unusual challenge of rebuilding a compliance function that the bribery scandal had exposed as not only weak but sometimes corrupt. Solmssen and Löscher undertook an intense effort to resolve outstanding cases, change the culture, redesign compliance processes and make adherence to law and ethics a critical part of performance appraisals. To help address integrity issues in the future, a newly energised CCO and compliance function was established. The corruption scandal, which began with a raid on the Siemens AG headquarters by over two hundred German police and investigators in November 2006 was concluded in December 2008 in a simultaneous settlement with the Munich public prosecutors office, the United States Department of Justice and the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. On the same day, Siemens AG was confirmed as a "responsible contractor," i.e. eligible to bid on government contracts, by the United States government. In the course of the investigations and settlement Siemens paid fines and incurred expenses exceeding $2.5 billion, but avoided much greater fines and debarment from governmental procurement programs around the world. For the first time in the history of the enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, the United States Department of Justice recommended penalties lower than those prescribed by federal sentencing guidelines. Also for the first time, the Department recommended the appointment of a compliance monitor who was not an American lawyer. The appointment of Theo Waigel, the former Finance Minister of Germany, was groundbreaking and an important component of the successful implementation of the Siemens compliance program. As a consequence of the settlements achieved with various enforcement agencies around the world, Solmssen became a leader in international efforts to combat corruption. Under his direction, a monetary settlement with the World Bank was organized as a global campaign to combat corruption pursuant to which Siemens committed to funding anti-corruption initiatives around the world. He led successful efforts at the World Economic Forum and the G20 to keep corruption high on the global policy agenda, and drove increased corporate participation in "collective action" to combat corruption. Solmssen was also the Siemens board member responsible for its business in North and South America. He appointed new CEOs all of the countries in his region of responsibility, moved Siemens USA's headquarters from New York to Washington, DC, dramatically heightened Siemens' visibility, and promoted better relations with the US government. Siemens was mentioned by President Barack Obama in two successive State of the Union addresses for its commitment to vocational education and support for increased infrastructure focus.
In October 2016, Peter replaced Tom Russo as EVP and General Counsel of AIG, heading up the global legal, compliance, and regulatory functions. He leads an award-winning team and reported directly into CEOs Peter Hancock and Brian Duppereault. Peter continues his anticorruption work and will be speaking on the topic at a being held by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development which was held in summer 2017. Peter promoted a culture of integrity while at AIG, a goal still being promoted. He also led the regulatory team through the end of AIG's SIFI designation. Peter left AIG in September 2017.
Personal
Solmssen is the eldest son of Arthur R. G. Solmssen and Marsha Moffat Solmssen. Before his retirement, Solmssen's father was a partner in Saul, Ewing, Remick & Saul of Philadelphia and author of novels set in Philadelphia's Main Line western suburbs. Peter Solmssen is married to Sarah Elizabeth McCarty Solmssen, a partner at Ballard, Spahr, Andrews, & Ingersoll. The couple have three children.
