Enron scandal

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The nineties seemed to some nervous observers uncannily like a re-run of the Roaring Twenties; and indeed the trajectory of the stock market in the 1990s was almost identical to that of the 1920s. Yet in some ways it was more like a rerun of the 1720s. What John Law’s Mississippi Company had been to the bubble that launched the eighteenth century, so another company would be to the bubble that ended the twentieth. It was a company that promised its investors wealth beyond their wildest imaginings. It was a company that claimed to have reinvented the entire financial system. And it was a company that took full advantage of its impeccable political connections to ride all the way to the top of the bull market. Named by Fortune magazine as America’s Most Innovative Company for six consecutive years (1996-2001), that company was Enron.

In November 2001, Alan Greenspan received a prestigious award, adding his name to a roll of honour that included Mikhail Gorbachev, Colin Powell and Nelson Mandela. The award was the Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service. Greenspan had certainly earned his accolade. From February 1995 until June 1999 he had raised US interest rates only once. Traders had begun to speak of the ‘Greenspan put’ because having him at the Fed was like having a ‘put’ option on the stock market (an option but not an obligation to sell stocks at a good price in the future). Since the middle of January 2000, however, the US stock market had been plummeting, belatedly vindicating Greenspan’s earlier warnings about irrational exuberance. There was no one Black Day, as in 1987. Indeed, as the Fed slashed rates, from 6.5 per cent down in steps to 3.5 per cent by August 2001, the economy looked like having a soft landing; at worst a very short recession. And then, quite without warning, a Black Day did dawn in New York - in the form not of a financial crash but of two deliberate plane crashes. Amid talk of war and fears of a 1914-style market shutdown, Greenspan slashed rates again, from 3.5 per cent to 3 per cent and then on down - and down - to an all-time low of 1 per cent in June 2003. More liquidity was pumped out by the Fed after 9/11 than by all the fire engines in Manhattan. But it could not save Enron. On 2 December 2001, just two weeks after Greenspan collected his Enron award, the company filed for bankruptcy.

The resemblances between the careers of John Law, perpetrator of the Mississippi bubble, and Kenneth Lay, chief executive of Enron, are striking, to say the least. John Law’s philosopher’s stone had allowed him ’to make gold out of paper’. Ken Lay’s equivalent was ’to make gold out of gas’. Law’s plan had been to revolutionize French government finance. Lay’s was to revolutionize the global energy business. For years the industry had been dominated by huge utility companies that both physically provided the energy - pumped the gas and generated the electricity - and sold it on to consumers. Lay’s big idea, supplied by McKinsey consultant Jeffrey K. Skilling, was to create a kind of Energy Bank, which would act as the intermediary between suppliers and consumers. Like Law, Lay, the son of a poor Missouri preacher, had provincial beginnings - as did Enron, originally a small gas company in Omaha, Nebraska. It was Lay who renamed the company (The company was originally going to be called Enteron until the Wall Street Journal pointed out that ’enteron’ is a Greek-derived word for the intestines.) and relocated its headquarters to Houston, Texas. Like Law, too, Lay had friends in high places. Himself a long-time ally of the Texan energy industry, President George H. W. Bush supported legislation in 1992 that deregulated the industry and removed government price controls. Around three quarters of Enron’s $6.6 million in political contributions went to the Republican Party, including $355,000 from Lay and his wife in the 2000 election. Senator Phil Gramm was Enron’s second-largest recipient of campaign contributions in 1996, and a strong proponent of Californian energy deregulation.

By the end of 2000, Enron was America’s fourth-largest company, employing around 21,000 people. It controlled a quarter of the US natural gas business. Riding a global wave of energy sector privatization, the company snapped up assets all over the world. In Latin America alone the company had interests in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia, from where Enron laid its pipeline across the continent to Brazil. In Argentina, following the intervention of Lay’s personal friend George W. Bush, Enron bought a controlling stake in the largest natural gas pipeline network in the world. Above all, however, Enron traded, not only in energy but in virtually all the ancient elements of earth, water, fire and air. It even claimed that it could trade in Internet bandwidth. In a scene straight out of The Sting, bank analysts were escorted through fake trading floors where employees sat in front of computers pretending to do broadband deals. It was the Mississippi Company all over again. And, just as in 1719, the rewards to investors seemed irresistible. In the three years after 1997, Enron’s stock price increased by a factor of nearly five, from less than $20 a share to more than $90. For Enron executives, who were generously ‘incentivized’ with share options, the rewards were greater still. In the final year of its existence, Enron paid its top 140 executives an average of $5.3 million each. Luxury car sales went through the roof. So did properties in River Oaks, Houston’s most exclusive neighbourhood. ‘I’ve thought about this a lot,’ remarked Skilling, who became Enron chief operating officer in 1997, ‘and all that matters is money… You buy loyalty with money. This touchy-feely stuff isn’t as important as cash. That’s what drives performance.’ ‘You got multiples of your annual base pay at Enron,’ Sherron Watkins recalled when I met her outside the now defunct Enron headquarters in Houston. ‘You were really less thought of if you got a percentage, even if it was 75 per cent of your annual base pay. Oh, you were getting a percentage. You wanted multiples. You wanted two times your annual base pay, three times, four times your annual base pay, as a bonus.’ In the euphoria of April 1999, the Houston Astros even renamed their ballpark Enron Field.

The only problem was that, like John Law’s System, the Enron ‘System’ was an elaborate fraud, based on market manipulation and cooked books. In tapes that became public in 2004, Enron traders can be heard asking the El Paso Electric Company to shut down production in order to maintain prices. Another exchange concerns ‘all the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers of California’. The results of such machinations were not only the higher prices Enron wanted, but also blackouts for consumers. In the space of just six months after the deregulation law came into effect, California experienced no fewer than thirty-eight rolling blackouts. (In another tape, traders watching television reports of Californian forest fires shout ‘Burn, baby, burn!" as electricity pylons buckle and fall.) Even with such market-rigging, the company’s stated assets and profits were vastly inflated, while its debts and losses were concealed in so-called special-purpose entities (SPEs) which were not included in the company’s consolidated statements. Each quarter the company’s executives had to use more smoke and more mirrors to make actual losses look like bumper profits. Skilling had risen to the top by exploiting new financial techniques like mark-to-market accounting and debt securitization. But not even chief finance officer Andrew Fastow could massage losses into profits indefinitely, especially as he was now using SPEs like the aptly named Chewco Investments to line his and other executives’ pockets. Enron’s international business, in particular, was haemorrhaging money by the mid 1990s, most spectacularly after the cancellation of a major power generation project in the Indian state of Maharashtra. EnronOnline, the first web-based commodity-trading system, had a high turnover; but did it make any money? In Houston, the euphoria was fading; the insiders were feeling the first symptoms of distress. Fastow’s SPEs were being given increasingly ominous names: Raptor I, Talon. He and others surreptitiously unloaded $924 million of Enron shares while the going was good.

Investors had been assured that Enron’s stock price would soon hit $100. When (for ‘personal reasons’) Skilling unexpectedly announced his resignation on 14 August 2001, however, the price tumbled to below $40. That same month, Sherron Watkins wrote to Lay to express her fear that Enron would ‘implode in a wave of accounting scandals’. This was precisely what happened. On 16 October Enron reported a $618 million third-quarter loss and a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholder equity. Eight days later, with a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry pending, Fastow stepped down as CFO. On 8 November the company was obliged to revise its profits for the preceding five years; the overstatement was revealed to be $567 million. When Enron filed for bankruptcy on 2 December, it was revealed that the audited balance sheet had understated the company’s long-term debt by $25 billion: it was in fact not $13 billion but $38 billion. By now, distress had turned to revulsion; and panic was hard on its heels. By the end of 2001 Enron shares were worth just 30 cents.

In May 2006 Lay was found guilty of all ten of the charges against him, including conspiracy, false statements, securities fraud and bank fraud. Skilling was found guilty on 18 out of 27 counts. Lay died before sentencing while on holiday in Aspen, Colorado. Skilling was sentenced to 24 years and 4 months in prison and ordered to repay $26 million to the Enron pension fund; an appeal is pending. All told, sixteen people pled guilty to Enron-related charges and five others (so far) have been found guilty at trial. The firm’s auditors, Arthur Andersen, were destroyed by the scandal. The principal losers, however, were the ordinary employees and small shareholders whose savings went up in smoke, turned into mere ‘wind’, just like the millions of livres lost in the Mississippi crash.

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