Enron

Lay is being made the patsy.

I don't believe he had anything to do with the Enron "stuff", other than being oblivious to its goings on.

As CEO in the latter part of the company's days, he should have seen what was happening and had happened, but I don't believe he did.

If anything, he is guilty of mismanagement, insider trading, and maybe even trying to help cover it up, but I don't think he was involved in the "faked earnings" part of the scandal.

Now, as for Jeff Skilling, that is another story. He's as guilty as sin.

BTW, if Lay is convicted, then yes, I believe that GW will do as Clinton did for his buddies and pardon him on his last day of office.

 

We've been okay as a whole, but many people have suffered due to the collapse, and the domino effect that it had with other companies.

Arthur Andersen also took a pretty big hit.

That said, we did just have Lyondell-Citgo move their headquarters to Houston, so everything is balancing out.

I think the city learned a lesson in the mid-'80's not to put all of our eggs into the "energy" basket. Things are much more diverse now, so a felled market will not bring down the entire city again.

My pastor's wife worked for Enron, and she still works for one of the pipelines that they sold after the crash. She lost about $2 million in retirement. It's a good thing that she is still relatively young and they were not living past their means, otherwise they would have been devastated, not that losing $2 million isn't devastating, but I think you get my point.

I really feel sorry for those folks who depended on that money to live, such as the recently retired and those on the verge thereof.

The biggest "show" out of all of this was when the Astros sued to have Enron Field renamed. It is now Minute Maid Park. (I liked Enron Field better.)

There are now two huge, brand-new, former Enron skyscrapers in downtown for sale, in case anyone is in the market.

 

I dont think the President should pardon anyone at all.

I read some of the issues with Enron in my Business class. One of the things that struck me were workers who were pictured at a business meeting standing up, applauding at the entrance of a couple of circus elephants making their appearance (in a hotel ballroom, during a business meeting). My first thought would have been, 'what the heck is an elephant doing here - AND who is paying for it?'. But the looks on the meeting participants faces said they were overjoyed and fully participatory to be led down the path they eventually found themselves on.

Fiscal responsibility starts with self. When you mentioned a young woman friend of yours that lost '2 million in retirement', that right there reinforced the idea that this entire company was profiting far above the real value of their product. Who has 2 million in retirement benefits? Apparently nobody at Enron. Perhaps that was just more of the famous Enron fantasy accounting?

A huge company full of business people and only a few are responsible for all the bad accounting and creative business law? I think not. It took all those employees to get that company rolling, to keep it profitable, and someone somewhere should have noticed that things were off.

I guess it was okay for all those innocent workers to collect such outrageous benefits? Seems to me these innocent workers should have gotten jobs in fantasy land and steered clear of the business world. Surely they knew they were above average in benefits and it seems (from my comfy chair) they didnt care. What goes up, always comes down.

 

Can't deny the possibility of the above, but it's interesting that those $ signs can make a lot of people just refuse to see immorality, ethical lapses, graft etc. when these same people would NEVER actively participate in same.

"Love of money" syndrome!

No wonder Jesus talked about it so much!

 

Exactly what I was thinking just-want-peace.

 

I should have been more clear, I think, in my explanation.

My pastor's wife had stock in the company worth $2 million. She had worked for them for something like 15 years as a Senior Accountant of a particular pipeline, in fact, the only line which was still making a profit after the collapse. The stock she had was part of her benefits package from the company, but she did not have this money in cash. It was all stock.

I don't know about in Hawaii, but I know plenty of people in Houston who work in the energy field and have comparable amounts worth of stock in their company.

My mother worked for Southwestern Bell back in the 70's and when she left, after 11 years, she had something like 10,000 shares of their stock or more. Of course, if she had stayed with the company longer, it would have been worth a lot more when she quit or retired.

Big companies like that often give stocks to their employers in lieu of an actual "real" amount in retirement funds.

BTW, I can promise you that, although she is an accountant with them, she had no idea what was going on. You are talking about a huge company with thousands of employees and dozens of subsidiaries with their own employees. It's like saying the city dog catcher must be on the take because the mayor was defrauding the government. I really don't think you can make that stick.

 

I hope to see Kenny Boy join Bernie Ebbers and be put away for a very, very long time. Let's add Joseph Nacchio to that cell, and they can all defraud each other.

 

I agree with every word of this except I don't think GWB would pardon Lay. But I hope he would.

 

Ken Lay Chairman, Enron Corp. 4,002,259 $184,494.426

Bush will reward failure and greed he will be pardoned.

 

I hope not. Because of Enron bosses we accountants got saddled with the Sarbanes-Oxley requirements.

 

I don't doubt that Lay is guilty of insider trading, shown by his(and other top execs) selling his(their) stock while at the same time telling their employees that things were fine and forecasts showed Enron would approach $100 per share.

To top it off, before the end was fully come, the company would not allow employees to sell their stock, so people who didn't get out early with the big wigs lost it all.

An analogy (my favorite things):

A group of men rob your bank and kill the guard in the process. They run out of the bank and accidentally drop several thousand dollars on the ground as they flea. You, standing there, see the money fall, realize what happened, and take the fallen money in order to offset what they have just stolen from "your" savings. You are no doubt guilty of a crime, but you would not be charged with murder, etc, like the other folks.

Put Ken Lay in that position and you have someone who was at the wrong place at the wrong time, but instead of stepping forward and doing the right thing, decided cash in his chips so that he would not lose like he saw everyone else would.

Ken Lay is, I believe, guilty of that, but he was not involved in the fraudulent activities which took place before he was even Chairman.

I do believe that every plug nickel that he got from the early sell of his stock should have been given back to the company as debt payment.

No one who committed a crime should be able to keep the proceeds from that crime.

Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow are the 2 masterminds and the most deserving of extreme punishment.

 

I think Lay was set up, just like the employees.

The effects of that mess reach further than people realized originally. The Teacher's Retirement System orginally told their people that they were not hurt because TRS and the State of Texas was not invested in Enron, but closer examination showed that they were invested in some satellite companies that Enron owned, and when it fell the satellites fell.

The damage to Arthur Anderson had ripple affects too, as it was a respected company whose reach touched all of Texas prior to that nonsense.

 

I've been out of accounting for several years now. What is "Sarbanes-Oxley "?

 

Brother - I got the 'stock worth 2 million part'. I have to say, there was not enough value of their product to sustain that kind of benefit no matter how you slice it.

With that kind of thinking, people in Texas should be paying about 15 dollars for a gallon of milk.

Enron will forever more be a cautionary tale.

 

If people would only follow old Solomon's advice!

 

I have had a 401(k) since they started back in the 1980s but I don't think I was in the stock market at the time of the Enron collapse.