Word: enronize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...only one on the board with an investment banking background. An investment banker for a decade, she had run her own investment banking firm and served as a vice president and director at the Chemical Bank of New York. And she had a lot of questions that the Enron execs pitching the deal didn't seem to want to answer...
Long before the power crisis, California and Enron got along just fine. The California Public Employees' Retirement System (CalPERS), the nation's largest pension fund investor, had invested $250 million in one of the first of Enron's now-infamous off-balance-sheet partnerships - called JEDI - and got a 73 percent return over just three years. Small wonder then that when Enron execs came back in 1997 with JEDI II, a similar vehicle to invest in energy projects, including Enron's own Energy Services, CalPERS listened...
...according to minutes of a closed-door 1997 CalPERS Investment Committee meeting obtained by TIME, members saw in JEDI II the same red flags flying at the Enron crime scene now. The committee was clearly mystified by Enron's murky corporate structure and by the company's proposal to put up stock, not cash, for part of their investment in JEDI II. The potential for conflicts of interest between Enron and JEDI - already flagged by CalPERS' investment advisers - was also raised...
...Fastow sat at the crossroads of Enron's duplicity, and Richard Buy, Enron's chief risk manager, found himself increasingly at odds with Fastow as the pressure to do deals mounted. "Rick's group and the dealmakers were constantly in conflict," says a former finance executive. In the past couple of years, the risk-evaluation structures that had been put in place were compromised, the former executive asserts. Challenging Fastow's deals got Buy, who reported to Fastow, a ticket to corporate Siberia. Similarly, Fastow had the power to overwhelm potential whistle-blowers like Jordan Mintz, a former Enron attorney...
...financial man, this is the height of hubris. Money seeks its highest reward. If Fastow's deals were really good enough and transparent enough, investors would have come running. And Enron's stock would still be flying. You don't have to be a financial genius to understand that...