Word: enronize
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
After a four-year investigation, 16 weeks of testimony and less than six days of deliberations, a jury of eight women and four men decided the decline and fall of Enron weren't just bad press and bad luck, as the two had claimed. The rot came from within. For all the Porsches parked in the company garage, it turns out Enron didn't have much in the bank. Forensic auditors have discovered that cash flow in 2000--the money left over after the bills are paid--was a negative $153 million, not the heady $3 billion claimed. The nearly...
...jury found that Lay criminally touted the stock even after whistle-blower Sherron Watkins gave him her famous memo in August 2001 warning that Enron's accounting was deeply flawed; Skilling had quit only days before. Both men were found guilty on every charge of fraud and conspiracy in the indictment--six against Lay, 13 against Skilling. While Skilling was acquitted on nine charges of insider trading, he and Lay were also convicted on various other charges involving stock sales and audits. The 64-year-old founder faces up to 165 years of hard time; Skilling, 52, is up against...
...Buell, an early member of the Enron Task Force, remembers how difficult it was to assemble a case back in January 2002--a month after the company's bankruptcy and with the suicide of Enron's vice chairman Cliff Baxter seared into everyone's conscience. "Enron was the 9/11 of the financial markets," says Buell, now a visiting law professor at the University of Texas, "but nobody wanted to be a witness." Slowly, the task force's prosecutors turned the screws on the bad guys. But it was early 2004 before they had enough "serious momentum" to indict Skilling...
...Enron joins WorldCom, Adelphia and Tyco among the big companies busted by President Bush's Corporate Fraud Task Force, which has won 1,063 convictions, including guilty verdicts against 36 chief financial officers and 167 corporate CEOs and presidents. "Behavior has clearly changed since the Enron crisis," says Roman Weil, a professor of accounting at the University of Chicago. Part of that is a result of the Sarbanes-Oxley bill, which holds bosses criminally responsible if their company's accounting is faulty. So CEOs are paying closer attention to financial statements--and passing that responsibility down the line. "The criminalization...
...Enron's greatest failure may have been asserting that it could offset major risks by buying assets like utilities and then developing and trading complex financial instruments around them. The company's energy-trading imitators paid a dear price: the Williams Co., based in Oklahoma, and Dynegy, based in Texas, saw their stock prices drop from the $45 range to less than $1 before rebounding slightly...