Deven Sharma’s departure comes fast on the heels of the U.S. credit-rating downgrade. S&P chief downgrades himself

The president of the ratings agency that downgraded the U.S. government’s credit rating earlier this month is set to resign before the end of the year, the company said..

Standard & Poor’s President Deven Sharma will give up his post on Sept. 12 to “pursue other opportunities,” parent McGraw-Hill Cos. said in a statement Monday night. Sharma, 55, will stay on with the firm through the end of the year as Citibank chief operating officer Douglas Peterson becomes the firm’s president.


Sharma’s departure comes barely more than two weeks after S&P announced its decision to downgrade the U.S. credit rating to AA+ amid what it described as uncertainty about Washington’s political climate and whether the United States would be able to make big steps toward deficit reduction.

The agency offered its downgrade even after the Treasury Department argued that S&P’s number crunchers had overestimated future U.S. national debt by $2 trillion and the firm corrected its math in a final release.

“It looks like he’s being helped out the door,” Noel Hebert, a credit strategist at Mitsubishi UFJ Securities USA Inc. in New York, told Bloomberg. “If it was a planned retirement, it should have been handled in a different way.”

Harold McGraw III, the CEO of McGraw-Hill, said in a statement that “S&P will continue to produce ratings that are comparable, forward-looking and transparent” under its new leadership.