The rise and fall of Enron: a brief history

In my last blog entry I will talk about the rise and fall of Enron. In our blogs we focused on the fraud case, but to understand everything we should know something about the history.

It all started back in 1985 when Houston Natural Gas -where Ken Lay was CEO- and Omaha–Based Internorth merged. At that time Enron was only an interstate pipeline company. In 1999 they extended their horizons by launching Enron online, the company’s website where it was possible to trade commodities. That was a masterstroke, the company grew rapidly. In 2000, they were already 7^th largest company on the Fortune 500. But what goes up must come down. In 2001 the drawback became clear. Enron was hiding their debt as a result of setting up a complex web of subsidiary companies.

The consequences are well-known. There’s no doubt that Enron is one of the biggest frauds in corporate history. Justice should learn from this case and revise their legislation on accounting thoroughly.

http://www.cbc.ca/money/story/2006/05/25/enron-bkgd.html

The California Energy Crisis (2)

After Enron’s bankruptcy, a confidential memo surfaced in which Enron’s own lawyers admit that the company abused the rules, by manipulating the energy market. Also, the memo reveals the names of the strategies Enron used to exploit the California electricity market: ‘Wheel Out’, ‘Get Shorty’, ‘Fat Boy’, ‘Death Star’...

The ‘Death Star’ memo for instance literally states that “Enron gets paid for moving energy to relieve congestion without actually moving energy or relieving congestion". During his appeal, Skilling’s answer to all the questions concerning these memos would be: “The rules weren’t quite clear...”

Still, the question remains: Why did the traders act so unethical? The documentary draws a parallel with the well-known Milgram experiment. As Milgram found out, people lost their sense of morality when a supervisor says that behaving inhumanly -in this case giving higher electric shocks- is permitted.

It’s obvious that Skilling could be seen as the man who’s telling people below him that it’s okay to put up the power. Consequently, the traders kept manipulating the electricity market without asking ‘why?’ enough. Or, as a former Enron trader said in the documentary: “I just didn’t want confirmed what I suspected might be true, that what I was doing was in fact unethical, if not worse.”


Based on http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/1972574.stm
and the documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room'

Insights into the Enron scandal

Curt Launer, managing director at Credit Suisse First Boston, presented a presentation about the Enron scandal. According to him, there were three main reasons for this scandal: innovation, compensation and investment attraction.

In the early nineties, Enron innovated a lot which led to buying large amounts of capital. The company grew and saw their shares rising.

To benefit their executives, Enron had a compensation system which included a stock option plan. This was an incentive to keep the stock price getting higher and higher. When the debts rose, Enron used creative accounting to maintain their price and to stay attractive for the investors. Of course this went wrong after a while, I have explained this in other blogs.

The Enron scandal is a good lesson for other companies. Companies should have high ethical standards so that these things can’t happen again and they should stay to their core business instead of entering other markets.

The California Energy Crisis (1)

Back in December 2001, California suffered from two rolling blackouts, which means that there was not enough electricity for America’s largest state. Accordingly, electricity prices shot through the roof, in some cases by a factor of ten. How could this possibly happen and more important, who was responsible for this energy crisis?

It all started with the deregulation of the electricity market in California a few years earlier. Thanks to the complicated and hard-to-follow new rules, a few smart guys inside Enron, such as Tim Belden, found plenty of loopholes to exploit the California energy system.

Basically, the Enron energy traders followed two massively effective strategies to make money out of ‘those poor grandmothers in California’ (sic). First, the traders created artificial electricity shortages by shutting down power plants. In energy shortage, they exported power out of the state. When prices soared again, the traders brought it back in.

However, the real money was made by arbitrage, essentially by betting that electricity prices would go up. As a result, the Enron traders made billions of dollars for the company, while the State of California was being plundered. The whole California electrical system, built a hundred years ago by Edison, was all of a sudden turned into a casino...


Based on the documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room'

Sarbanes-Oxley Act

The Sox does not only refer to an Amercian baseball team, but also to the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, a United States federal law enacted approximately one year after the Enron scandal was revealed and it was meant to avoid other accounting scandals and to restore public confidence in the nation’s capital markets. This wide-ranging legislation directly caused the creation of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in order to protect the investors by controlling the auditors of public companies.

But a lot of people, including myself, doubt the effectiveness of the PCAOB and SOX, especially regarding increased regulation, professional conflicts, increased compliance costs, corporate federalism, and lack of clarity.

Though, we shouldn’t be too hard on this government intervention because it managed to increase the confidence of investors in the markets by requiring full disclosure, accuracy and transparency. So it seems the Sarbanes-Oxley Act deserves the benefit of the doubt, at least for now.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/tradejournals/article/165359568_1.html

Threat to Bush in Enron inquiry

In my previous blogs, I dealt with the appeal by Jeffrey Skilling, the former CEO of Enron. In this blog, I will talk about the disputed role of the ex-president George W. Bush and his administration.

Apparently Ken Lay contacted the treasury secretary by the end of October 2001 to propose a bail-out for Enron. This means that the White House probably knew about the problems of the firm before the implosion. It is also a common knowledge that Enron was the greatest financier to Bush’s campaign. And Ken Lay was known to be an old friend of Bush, who called him ‘Kenny Boy’.  It also emerged that former vice-president Dick Cheney met Ken Lay several times in April 2001, Cheney refused to reveal the details of those meetings. Bush and his administration anticipated on the criminal inquiry by the justice department by announcing they were going to review pension rights and corporate disclosure.

The US Congress wanted to take the White House to court for the first time in history but this didn’t worked out. Bush was too powerful, as president he had the power to nominate the judge, of course he chose someone in favor of him. Eventually Bush and his administration weren’t found guilty.  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2002/jan/11/corporatefraud.enron

Enron: The smartest guys in the room

When people are confronted with the Enron scandal, they spontaneously think of numbers and complicated transactions. But in reality, the story of Enron is more like a human tragedy. It’s a story about humans and their flaws, such as arrogance, intolerance, and greed.

The documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room' gives us a profound insight into the different backgrounds of the three protagonists in the Enron saga: Lay, Skilling and Fastow.

First of all, there's Kenneth ‘Ken’ Lay, son of a Baptist preacher, who tries to leave his poor childhood behind and has the ambition to make huge wealth for himself. The deregulation of the energy market became his first mission. He succeeded and founded Enron back in 1985, which he would leave in 2001 with 300 million dollars cashed in over the years.

Next, we meet Jeffrey ‘Jeff’ Skilling, a nerdy financial whizz-kid, who has a very Darwinian view of how the world works. When he applied for Harvard Business School, a professor posed him the question “Are you smart?”. His response was: “I’m fucking smart”. Skilling was the self-declared genius who came up with the idea that energy could be traded like stocks and bonds.

Finally, there's Andy Fastow, the clever guy who developed a bunch of dummy accounts to essentially keep up the profits. Andy is an eloquent speaker, a man who uses his charm and salesmanship to convince companies to invest in his fake accounting constructions.

Despite all these skills, the story of Enron ended like a Greek drama. Lay, Skilling, Fastow and other smart guys thought that they were changing the world. Eventually, they all became victims of their own hubris.


Based on the documentary 'Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room'