Federal Reserve Board Governor to Join Fluor

Fluor Corp. said Monday that it has elected Martha R. Seger, who recently announced her resignation from the Federal Reserve Board, to fill a vacancy on Fluor’s board of directors.

Seger replaces Caroline Leonetti Ahmanson, who retired at the end of last year from the 16-member board after reaching the mandatory retirement age of 72. She will join Fluor’s board after she leaves her Fed post at an undetermined date and moves to Arizona.

“We feel she is an excellent addition to our board because of her knowledge of world and national financial markets,” said Deborah Land, a Fluor spokeswoman.

Seger would be of particular help, Land said, in helping the company determine how to finance its projects. Fluor is a worldwide engineering, construction, maintenance and technical services company.

The outspoken Seger, 58, a former Michigan commissioner of financial institutions and professor of finance, is the only woman and the most senior governor on the Fed’s seven-member board of governors. She will be the only woman now sitting on Fluor’s board.

Seger was appointed to the Fed--the central bank that helps regulate the economy by controlling the nation’s money supply--in 1984 by then-President Ronald Reagan. She has typically represented the views of bankers and has often championed the causes of smaller banks.

She has urged a lessening of the paperwork that has become an increasing burden of mounting industry regulation. And she has sided with banks in urging expanded powers for the industry, an always volatile issue. She has also been a consistent advocate for lower interest rates and a generally easier monetary policy.

One of her major accomplishments, she has said, was her part in a coalition of Fed governors that won limited securities underwriting powers for bank subsidiaries--an action opposed by the Fed’s then-chairman, Paul A. Volcker.

Such views helped to keep her out of the Fed’s loop on key issues, and she recently has complained more about such snubbing. But when she announced her resignation Jan. 13, she cited a need to earn more than the $89,000 annual government pay and to be with her ailing mother as reasons for her departure.

Fluor directors are paid $30,000 a year for serving on the board. They receive an additional $1,000 payment for each board meeting they attend.

Ahmanson, who had been a Fluor director since 1985, heads her own modeling and talent agency and is the widow of financier Howard K. Ahmanson. She has been actively involved in cultural, civic, national and world affairs. A native Californian, she is a former chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco and serves on the boards of the Walt Disney Co. and the Carter Hawley Hale Stores Inc.