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When Ken Lay shows up this week to testify before Congress, the disgraced former chairman of Enron should know how to handle a hostile crowd. Even his current employees, after all, are calling for his head. Just a few weeks ago, Enron employees tell TIME, the Houston-based energy-trading company brought in an outside consulting firm to conduct a series of focus groups with some of the remaining workers on how to reinvigorate the sagging firm. One of the first steps, six out of eight people indicated in one session, should...
...knew all along about the possible ethical conflicts posed by the involvement of Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow in off-the-books partnerships with shell corporations, according to a confidential study conducted at Lay's request by the Houston law firm Vinson & Elkins. On Nov. 5, 1997, as first reported by the Wall Street Journal, the executive committee of Enron's board voted to provide hundreds of millions of dollars in loan guarantees to a partnership known as Chewco. Then, in June and November of 1999, the board waived the company's ethics code to allow Fastow to serve...
...books. So Fastow got creative. He tripled his staff, to more than 100, hiring various banking experts and giving them the task of selling and buying capital risk. "They were all young kids, 28 to 32, with great pedigrees, and they started coming up with these fancy derivatives," says Houston lawyer Tom Bilek, who interviewed dozens of former Fastow associates before suing Enron's management. "But Fastow was the boy genius setting all these SPEs...
...Fastow is married to a woman he met at Tufts, Lea Weingarten, whose family built a supermarket and real estate empire based in Houston. They were not social climbers, for good reason. "Lea is from an old Houston family," says Marti Mayo, executive director of the Contemporary Arts Museum. "She didn't need to move anywhere. She was there." For most of the Roaring Nineties, the Fastows did not play the power couple; instead they lived like other professionals in the West University area and raised two children. They worked together at Enron's finance divisions in the early...
...Late Monday evening (too late for the news shows) Pitt's House questioners finally got someone to talk about the bad guys - William Powers, who released the weekend report that had Tauzin and co. dreaming of perp walks through the streets of Houston. But Powers - the dean of the University of Texas law school who comes off a bit like a cowboy David Boies - had little to say that he hadn't written already, which was more or less what the Wall Street Journal had been reporting all month...