Word: condors
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...letter laid out what many executives knew but no one had the courage to say. Watkins homed in on two sets of transactions called Condor and Raptor (Enron had a penchant for names inspired by Jurassic Park and Star Wars) and argued that the accounting treatment was unsound, if not dishonest. Enron had booked huge profits from these entities while its stock price soared in 2000, despite the fact that neither Condor nor Raptor had any hard assets. But now that Enron's price was dropping, the company had to note these devaluations or pour more money into the companies...
...brought along a six-page letter detailing her worries, and Lay promised to have a team of lawyers review the controversial deals. But he decided to use Enron's law firm, Vinson & Elkins, despite Watkins' unease about a conflict of interest. Vinson & Elkins had been paid for work on Condor and Raptor transactions. But Lay went ahead with the review--whose scope he kept strictly limited...
...near. On Oct. 15 Vinson & Elkins issued a nine-page report stating that Andersen approved of the Condor and Raptor deals and that Enron had done nothing wrong. On Oct. 16 the company announced a $618 million third-quarter loss and a $1.2 billion reduction in shareholder equity. On Oct. 31 the sec opened a formal inquiry into Enron. Last week, a Vinson & Elkins spokesman said the law firm was "not in a position to talk about our engagement with Enron or any other client...
...know much about Sherron Watkins. We haven't met her in our living rooms, on TV in front of a bank of microphones, not yet. But because she wrote a letter to her boss, we know she knew, about the "Condor" and "Raptor" partnerships and the accounting and the doom Enron was facing. We know that in August she told them - her boss, Ken Lay, and then her friend at Arthur Andersen, who then told Andersen's head Enron auditor, David Duncan, who's now telling Congress. And so we know that they all knew...
...1970s, when his stardom was at its most luminous--with The Sting, The Way We Were, Condor and All the President's Men--he preferred the Utah mountains to Beverly Hills, taking three- and four-year breaks from acting. Except for a romance with actress Sonia Braga, whom he directed in The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), his private life has seldom drawn the spotlight. He has had only one marriage, to Lola Van Wagenen, which ended after 27 years, in 1985. And none of his three grown kids appears to have a Daddy Dearest story to tell...