Executive Director
AAI International Advisor for South Africa. David Lewis is the Executive Director at CorruptionWatch. He received his training in economics from the Universities of the Witwatersrand and Cape Town. Between 1975 and 1990 he worked in the trade union movement, serving as General Secretary of the General Workers Union and national organizer of the Transport and General Workers Union. From 1990 Lewis directed the Development Policy Research Unit, a UCT based research group specializing in trade and industrial policy. Between 1994 and 1996 he served as Special Advisor to the Minister of Labour and co-chaired the Presidential Commission on Labour Market Policy.
Lewis served on the Task Team advising the Minister of Trade and Industry on the development of competition policy and participated in the drafting of the Competition Act. In September 1999 he was appointed Chairperson of the Competition Tribunal. He was a member of Steering Group of the International Competition Network from its inception in 2001 and served as a vice-chairman of the Steering Group between 2004 and 2008. In January 2009 he was elected Chairman of the Steering Group of the ICN in which position he remained until his second and final term of office as Chairperson of the Competition Tribunal ended in July 2009. Lewis has served on the boards of the National Research Foundation, the Industrial Development Corporation (of which he was deputy Chair) and the International Marketing Council of South Africa. He currently serves on the boards of the Johannesburg Development Agency and South African Airways. He chairs the Debt Review Advisory Committee, a committee of the National Credit Regulator responsible for developing and monitoring the framework of rules governing consumer debt counseling.
In October 2009 David he was appointed an Extraordinary Professor at the Gordon Institute of Business Science of the University of Pretoria. In 2010 he was awarded an honorary doctorate in economic sciences by the University of Cape Town. His research and teaching interests span competition policy, industrial policy and political economy.