PORTLAND – Longtime Republican financier Robert Monks said Monday that he is supporting Democratic Senate candidate Chellie Pingree in her race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

Monks said he supports Pingree because he thinks the best chance for passing corporate reform laws is to have Democrats control Congress. Monks has run unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate three times, most recently in 1996, when he lost in the Republican primary to Collins and another candidate.

Monks told a crowd of about 30 people at a public forum organized by Pingree that the current administration isn’t doing all it can to take care of corporate and accounting scandals.

“We need Democratic control in the House and Democratic control in the Senate,” Monks said.

Monks is perhaps best known as being a resident of Cape Elizabeth and from a wealthy New England family.

But he is also a corporate critic who for decades has argued that chief executives have too much power and that corporations aren’t accountable for their actions.

On Monday, Monks, Pingree and Bevis Longstreth, a Securities and Exchange Commission commissioner in the 1980s and a Maine summer resident, spoke to a lunchtime crowd at Portland City Hall.

Monks said he supports Pingree because he thinks Democrats more likely than Republicans will bring about business reform to restore confidence in corporate America. He said he has contributed the maximum allowed under law.

Monks said his support for Pingree is unrelated to the 1996 Senate race, when he finished third in the Republican primary behind Collins and John Hathaway of Kennebunkport.

During that heated campaign, Monks and Collins at times attacked each other. One Monks ad derided Collins as a “career bureaucrat,” while the Collins campaign denounced Monks’ “desperate distortions.”

Megan Sowards, spokeswoman for the Collins campaign, downplayed Monks’ support of Pingree. The Collins campaign last month released its “Democrats for Collins” list of supporters.

“Bob Monks has had many successes in many facets of his life, but politics has not been one of them,” she said.

Deborah Barron, spokeswoman for the Pingree campaign, said Monks has been on Pingree’s supporter list for months.

“Chellie has a long, long list of Republican supporters, and we’re proud to have a coalition of bipartisan support,” Barron said.

Monks said even though he ran unsuccessfully for the Senate three times as a Republican, he considers himself to be independent.