Word: laying
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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 be to get rid of Lay...
Before the company officially went bankrupt, Lay, who had earned admiration for his unpolished, affable manner, had lost his loyal fan base. In late October--a day after Enron acknowledged that the SEC had opened an investigation of its accounting practices--Lay tried his best to raise the spirits of his downtrodden workforce. At a company gathering caught on videotape, the son of a Missouri minister promised that there wouldn't be any layoffs and that Enron would rise again. For once, though, the rank and file weren't drinking Ken's Kool-Aid. As one disgruntled worker...
...trader, Jim Schwieger, challenged Lay. Why, he asked, was chief financial officer Andrew Fastow sharing the stage--and gainfully employed--considering that he had just blown half a billion dollars mismanaging several Enron partnerships and earned $30 million doing it? Lay put his arm around Fastow and proclaimed his "unequivocal trust" in the CFO. The partnership accounting was complex stuff, Lay explained, but Fastow was on top of it--or he'd be in big trouble. A day after that buddy-buddy display, Fastow was history...
...failure last week. But he declined to testify, citing his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination. Says his spokesman, Gordon Andrew: "Our position remains that Mr. Fastow acted with the full knowledge and approval of Enron's board of directors, its office of the chairman, which included Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling, and its internal and external auditors and legal advisers." His former boss, Jeffrey Skilling, who quit as Enron CEO last August, had no such hesitation, insisting to his incredulous interrogators that things had gone swimmingly on his watch...
...trombone and tennis on the side. Most Enron employees didn't know who he was until relatively recently. As head of Enron Capital Management--his job in 1997 and '98, when he was named CFO--he wielded his power across a very narrow band. In contrast to the avuncular Lay and the brilliant Skilling, Fastow was a PowerPoint executive whose number-crunching talent far exceeded his managerial and people skills. Indeed, when Fastow was charged with running an actual business--he was named managing director of Enron Energy Services in 1996--he botched it, and Skilling had to reel...