America's Most Innovative Company: The Fall Of Enron

Enron had the largest bankruptcy in America’s history and it happened in less than a year because of scandals and manipulation Enron displayed with California’s energy supply. A few years ago, Enron was the world’s 7th largest corporation, valued at 70 billion dollars. At that time, Enron’s business model was full of energy and power. Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling had raised Enron to stand on a culture of greed, lies, and fraud, coupled with an unregulated accounting system, which caused Enron to go down. Lies were being told by top management to the government, its employees and investors. There was a rise in Enron 's share price because of pyramid scheme; their strategy consisted of claiming so much money to easily get away with their tricky ways. They deceived their investors so they could keep investing their money in the company.

Greg Whalley, (former Enron President and Chief Operation Officer) had six to eight conversations last fall with the Treasury’s Department Peter Fisher, including one in which he asked Fisher to call Enron’s lenders as they decided whether to extend credit to the company.

The collapse of Enron left thousands of employees without jobs and demolished the retirement accounts of employees and investors alike. Enron, a company much like General Electric (GE) was ranked as one of the top ten on the Fortune 500 list in 2001 (according to Fortune 500 archive list) right before Enron filed for bankruptcy in October of that year. According to an article by (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2002-01-27/news/0201270343_1_enron-stock-market-cautious-investors) Flynn McRobertshe, “At one time the seventh-largest company in the country, Enron was a popular pick for many investors--both individuals and large institutions such as pension and mutual funds.” No one expected a company of that size to be able collapse and conduct business like Enron did. To many it was hard to believe

The Enron Conglomerate was established in 1985 from its command center located in Houston, Texas which is the seventh greatest income earning corporation in the U.S. The first scandal that Enron suffered from was from a merge they made with Valhalla which is a small oil trading corporation centered in New York. A group of traders maxed out its trading limits costing Enron millions of dollars. Kenneth Lay was the CEO of Enron but partnered with Louis Borget. He began manipulating the accounting books which made it seem as if the company was generating profits. However, Borget as well as Mastroeni were the only one who knew what the real figures were. Unbelievably in 1987, Enron’s internal accountant: David Woytek received a phone call from a bank in New York regarding several deposits being made to Mastroeni’s personal account. “When Mastroeni and Borget were being harassed to confess, they seemed to deny it and claimed they were only attempting to shift the profits rather than rob” (Barboza, David 2002). Either way this type of conspiratorial is illegal. Sadly research did not discover the truth to its entirety because auditors were fooled.

Enron is viewed by many as the quintessential corrupt corporate juggernaut. Corporations are nothing more than a collection of people. If a corporation is corrupt than it must be filled with corrupt employs, and led by a front office devoid of moral standards, right? Perhaps this is not entirely true. Certainly an element of corruption was present in the case of Enron, the number of corrupt employees may not have been as encompassing as presumed. When asked to rate their level of honesty, most would respond that they are honest. In actuality, most people are not completely honest, and their level of dishonesty is correlated with their ability to rationalize the dishonesty and preserve their self- image as an honest and admirable person

Enron executives and accountants cooked the books and lied about the financial state of the company. They manipulated the earnings and booked revenue that never came in. This was encouraged by Ken Lay as long as the company was making money. Once word got out that they were disclosing this information, their stock plummeted from $90 to $0.26 causing the corporation to file for bankruptcy.

To invest your whole savings in a company through stock is an important risk almost everyone will do in their lifetime. When investing in a company you see their financial records and can see if the company’s stock value will go up if you invest in them making your money increase as well. What if this company falsifies their records and in a couple of days the company and its stock value go from $90 per share to just a penny per share. You lose your money just because a company cheated and stole your money.

Enron began in July 1985, and its headquarters were in Houston. It started from a small regional energy supplier. However, Enron was dissatisfied with the traditional way of doing business, so it began to look toward energy security. Enron 's management believed that the creation of derivative securities market for any commodity was possible, so Enron developed energy commodity futures, options, and other financial derivatives. Energy deregulation brought this company great commercial opportunities. Enron was considered to be a model of the innovative company. Because of the deregulation, it became a trader of everything from oil and gas futures to weather derivatives. They took a new strategy by setting up a “gas bank”. Later, the generation of electricity forced Enron to explore new industrial customers for its gas. From 1990 to 2000, Enron largely expanded their oversea business. In 1994, Enron began buying and selling electricity. After Skilling became the COO and Fastow became the CFO of the company, Enron continued to implement dual strategies of expanding its trading activities and synchronously investing a lot of money in physical assets. Enron’s shares, in the late 1990s, had significantly outperformed the market even when the market fell.

Enron lost billions of dollars within a couple of months. This record breaking stock drop landed the company on the Exchange Commission and the U.S. Justice Department’s radar resulting in an investigation that revealed the company’s corrupt business practices ultimately shocking the world,

The Enron scandal was a financial scandal that was revealed in late 2001. After a series of discoveries involving irregular accounting procedures which could be turned in as fraud, went on throughout the 1990s, involving Enron and its accounting firm Arthur Andersen. Enron stood at the verge of falling into the largest bankruptcy in history by mid-November 2001. An attempt by a smaller energy company, Dynegy, was not feasible. Enron filed for bankruptcy on December 2, 2001. As the scandal was shown, Enron shares dropped from over $90.00 to just pennies. As Enron had been considered a blue chip stock, this was event came as a surprise to all and was an overall disaster in the financial world. Enron's downfall happened soon after

Imagine that we were stockholders of one of the biggest company, and our stock value has been on the rise and is now up to almost 100 dollars a share, but one day, our share value drops below one dollar. This happened to shareholders of Enron. The total debt amounted to over $ 16 billion, which was the largest corporate bankruptcy in American history. Shareholders lost 60 billion dollars within a few days, 4500 employees lost their jobs, and the employees lost billions in pension benefits. I had never heard the name of Enron nor Enron’s scandal until I watched a film, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in The Room,” but I realized the Enron scandal affected the whole of the business in the United States.

After a merger in 1985, between two relatively small regional companies Houston Natural Gas Co., and InterNorth Incorporated, Enron Corp was formed. Enron Corporation became one of the biggest energy, and service company across the united states. Following this merger, Kenneth lay, who was at the time the CEO of Houston Natural Gas, also became the CEO of the newly formed Enron Corp. With his savvy skills already adopted in the smaller regional natural gas company, Kenneth Lay, was ready to label Enron into the energy trader and supplier powerhouse. This dream of turning Enron into natural gas resource was

Ethics in the business world can often times become a second priority behind the gaining of profits and success as a company. This is the controversial issue that led to the Enron scandal and ultimately the fall of this company. Enron Corporation was an energy company, and in the peaks of their success, they were the top supplier of natural gas and electricity throughout America. Enron Corporation came about from a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Houston Natural Gas was a gas providing company formed in Houston during the 1920’s. InterNorth was a company formed in Nebraska during the 1930’s and owned one of America’s largest pipeline networks. In 1985, Sam Segnar, the CEO of InterNorth bought out Houston Natural Gas for $2.4 billion. A year later in 1986, Segnar retired and was replaced by Kenneth Lay, who renamed the company and created Enron. Enron was the owner of the second largest pipeline in America that measured over 36,000 miles. The company was also the creator of the “Gas Bank”, which was a new way to trade and market natural gas and served as an intermediary between buyers and sellers. As the company continued to develop, it became more of a trader rather than a producer of gas. This trading extended into coal, steel, water and many other areas. One of Enron’s largest successes was their creation of a website called, “Enron Online” in 1999, which quickly became one of the top trading cites in the world. By the year 2000 Enron as a company was

The story of Enron begins in 1985, with the merger of two pipeline companies, orchestrated by a man named Kenneth L. Lay (1). In its 15 years of existence, Enron expanded its operations to provide products and services in the areas of electricity, natural gas as well as communications (9). Through its diversification, Enron would become known as a corporate America darling (9) and Fortune Magazine’s most innovative company for 5 years in a row (10). They reported extraordinary profits in a short amount of time. For example, in 1998 Enron shares were valued at a little over $20, while in mid-2000, those same shares were valued at just over $90 (10), the all-time high during the company’s existence (9).

The case of Enron Corporation and Andersen, LLP can be noted as one of the most infamous fraud scandals in US history. Investors lost millions of dollars and ruined the public’s trust. Enron was once the seventh largest public company in the United States and Andersen LLP was the world’s largest and most respected business organizations. Enron’s stock prices soared to approximately $100 to less than $10 in 2001. How did these two big giants fall into oblivion and what could have been done to avoid the disaster of these companies?