THE WHITE HOUSE

                     Office of the Press Secretary
                           (Dakar, Senegal)
________________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                                      April 2, 1998

               PRESIDENT CLINTON NAMES EDWARD L. ROMERO
                 AS UNITED STATES AMBASSADOR TO SPAIN

The President today announced his intent to nominate Edward L. Romero to be U.S. Ambassador to Spain.

Mr. Edward L. Romero, of Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a Korean War Veteran and the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of Advanced Sciences, Inc., an international environmental engineering and waste management corporation that recently merged with Commodore Applied Technologies, Inc., a publicly traded technology company. Fluent in Spanish, Mr. Romero has been a member of the U.S. Trade Representative's Services Policy Advisory Committee and has led a number of U.S. delegations to Mexico. During the Carter administration he served on the federal advisory committee for trade negotiations and he was a member of the U.S. delegation to the Helsinki Accords. In addition to his business success, Mr. Romero is a well-known leader in the Hispanic community. He has served on the President's Hispanic Advisory Committee, was a founding member of the Albuquerque Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and serves on the board of directors of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute. In 1989, Mr. Romero was named National Hispanic Businessman of the Year by the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of the Commerce. Mr. Romero is actively engaged in a variety of civic and charitable activities. He has received numerous awards and acknowledgments from such organizations as the National Kidney Foundation, the New Mexico Anti-Defamation League, the National Hispanic Scholarship Foundation and the Multiple Sclerosis Society.

Mr. Romero studied from 1955 to 1958 in California at Los Angeles State College and Citrus College.

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