Robert Mosbacher is the ninth president and chief executive officer of the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (Opic). Opic acting president and CEO Ross Connelly conducted the swearing-in at Opic headquarters in Washington, DC.

Mosbacher was nominated for the position by President George Bush on June 29, approved unanimously by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on October 5 and by the full US Senate on October 7. He succeeds Ross Connelly, who had served as Opic acting president and CEO since March 1, and Peter Watson, who was Opic president and CEO from June 2001 through February 2005.

“As a self-sustaining agency that supports United States investment in emerging markets, Opic is truly unique. It has extraordinary capacity to do good, and has done so on a significant scale since 1971,” Mosbacher says.

From 1986 to 2005, Mosbacher was president and CEO of Mosbacher Energy Company of Houston, Texas, an independent oil and gas exploration and production company. He was also vice-chairman of Mosbacher Power Group, an independent electric power developer.

Mosbacher helped to launch the Reagan administration’s Private Sector Initiatives Program, and was appointed by Reagan to three successive presidential task forces on Private Sector Initiatives during the 1980s. He served as chairman of the board of the Texas Department of Human Services from 1989 to 1991, and as chairman of the Texas governors “Welfare Reform Task Force in 1988. During the 1970s, he worked on the staff of Senator Howard Baker of Tennessee.