Tony Gardner is a Managing Partner with Brookfield’s Private Equity group; a Senior Adviser at the Brunswick Group, a communications and strategic consulting firm; a Senior Counsel at Sidley Austin, an international law firm; a board member of Iberdrola, a leading global utility, and a member of the investment committee of Qualitas Equity Partners, a fund of funds. He is also a member of the Board of Directors of the American Ditchley Foundation, a member of the advisory boards of the Centre for European Reform, the European Policy Centre, the American European Community Association and a non-resident Fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
He served as US Ambassador to the European Union (2014-2017). In that capacity, he played a key role in the negotiations of a Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership Agreement and of Privacy Shield, the legal framework enabling flows of personal data from Europe to the United States. He was instrumental in bringing about a change in US privacy legislation that gives European citizens greater rights to protect their privacy interests before US federal courts.
Before serving in Brussels, Tony Gardner worked at Palamon Capital Partners, a private equity firm and GE Capital, both in London. During 1994-1995 he served as Director of European Affairs at the National Security Council; in that capacity he focused on EU issues and was closely involved in the negotiation of the New Transatlantic Agenda. He has also worked at the Directorate-General for Competition Policy of the European Commission and at the Treuhandanstalt in Berlin.
He is the author of “Stars with Stripes: The Essential Partnership between the European Union and the United States,” Palgrave MacMillan (2020) and “A New Era in US-EU Relations?” Avebury Press (1997). He appears regularly on CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg, BBC, Euronews and Fox Business News as a commentator on transatlantic issues. He has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Financial Times and Foreign Affairs.
Tony Gardner is a graduate of Harvard College (B.A.), Oxford University (MPhil), Columbia Law School (J.D.) and London Business School (MSc in Finance).
Tony Gardner has lived in Europe for 29 years and is a dual US and Italian national. He is married to a Spaniard.