Enron Scandal: Who Are Responsible for Enron¡¦S Bankruptcy

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.

Jumping right into the summary then. Enron was one of the most successful corporations in America during its prime. Marketing electricity and other commodities, as well as, providing financial and risk management services to other companies were the main types of business that Enron conducted. However, Enron’s successful appearance was found out to be a façade, when it came out that the corporation was making a plethora of unethical business moves. Once the corporation’s actions became public, Enron’s fall from grace quickly followed. (Johnson, 2003)

Enron was an energy trading and communications company located in Houston, Texas. During 1996-2001 Enron was given the name of America’s Most Innovative Company by Fortune magazine as it was the seventh-largest corporation in the US. The problem that led this company to bankruptcy was due to the fact that fraudulent accounting practices took place allowing Enron to overstate their earnings and tuck away their high debt liabilities in order to have a more appealing balance sheet (Forbes.com, 2002). Enron’s accounting team “cooked” the books to every meaning of the word so that their investors would not see anything wrong with the failing organization. This poorly structured company led people to jail time, unemployment, and caused retirement stocks to be dried up. Enron had a social responsibility to its stockholders and rather than being up front and honest about the failing company they hid every financial flaw in order to keep receiving money from its investors. By Enron not keeping a social

The Enron scandal has far-reaching political and financial implications. In just 15 years, Enron grew from nowhere to be America's seventh largest company, employing 21,000 staff in more than 40 countries. But the firm's success turned out to have involved an elaborate scam. Enron lied about its profits and stands accused of a range of shady dealings, including concealing debts so they didn't show up in the company's accounts. As the depth of the deception unfolded, investors and creditors retreated, forcing the firm into Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December. More than six months after a criminal inquiry was announced, the guilty parties have still not been brought to justice.

several actions that led to Enron’s bankruptcy. The issues were with the accounting method used as well as the negligence in the methodology of the company’s administration. Although once upon a time it was at its best, but gradually due to mismanagement, lack of sufficient business, improper business strategies and greed of the employees and the leadership all together became the reason for Enron’s bankruptcy. Under the section of Federal Bankruptcy Code, giant companies seek financial protection. Even it allows the company to protect itself from such threats, still all of the above were neglected by Enron Corporation.

Enron was at one time America 's seventh largest corporation. Enron fooled the world by portraying to be a steady company with good revenue but at the end we all seen that was not the case. Surprisingly large parts of Enron profit were made of paper. This was made possible due to traders and executives who were corrupt. Having deep debt and hiding

Several parties were responsible for Enron crisis, including independent auditor, key executive officers, internal auditors, SEC and FASB. The hypocrisy, dishonorable actions and unethical behavior of Kenney Lay, Jeffrey Skilling, Andrew Fastow led to bankruptcy. This and many other problems, such as loss in transactions involving the swaps stocks, SPE related issues and est., finally contributed to crisis. As Enron executives, all of their concerns should have been focused on Enron’s profits, but seems that many of them only cared about their wealth. When financial problem surfaced, they did not attempt to fix it, but made efforts to maintain their own benefits and ignored the whole company’s and

The company Enron was formed in 1985 after two natural gas companies, Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth merged together. Kenneth Lay, former chief executive officer of Houston Natural Gas was named CEO of Enron and a year later, Lay was assigned to the chairman of Enron. A few years later, Enron launched a website to allow customers to buy stock for Enron, making it the largest business site in the world. The growth of Enron was rapid; it was even named seventh largest company on the Fortune 500 list; however things began to fall apart in 2001. (News, 2006). In the third quarter of that same year, Enron posted an enormous loss of over $600 million in four years. This is one of the reasons why one of the top executive resigned even though he had only after six months on the job. Their stock prices fell dramatically. Eventually, Enron filed for bankruptcy protection. This caused many investors to lose money they had invested in the company and employees to lose their jobs and their investments, including their retirement funds. The filing of bankruptcy and the resignation of one of the top executives, also led to an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Committee, which proved to be one of the biggest scandals in U.S. history. (News, 2006). All former senior executives stood trial for their illegal practices.

Enron – Enron is partially responsible for the crisis of confidence, because they committed the fraud via the special purpose entities. Because of the three percent rule, Enron was able to put lots of its liabilities onto those off-balance sheet entities. Also, Enron did not have adequate financial statement disclosures. Many of the top employees at Enron were able to “realize” an extraordinary profit within matters of a couple months because of the fraud. Additionally, Enron abused the mark-to-market accounting method for its long-term contracts. All of these fraudulent activities caused Enron’s profits to be overinflated.

On December 2, 2001, less than a month after it admitted accounting errors that inflated earnings by almost $600 million since 1994, the Houston-based energy trading company, Enron Corporation, filed for bankruptcy protection. With $62.8 billion in assets, it became the largest bankruptcy case in U.S. history, dwarfing Texaco's filing in 1987 when it had $35.9 billion in assets. The day Enron filed for bankruptcy its stock closed at 72 cents, down from more than $75 less than a year earlier. Many employees lost their life savings and tens of thousands of investors lost billions. Who is to Blame? That is what at least a half-dozen Congressional Committees, the SEC, the U.S. Justice

Enron's entire scandal was based on a foundation of lies characterized by the most brazen and most unethical accounting and business practices that will forever have a place in the hall of scandals that have shamed American history. To the outside, Enron looked like a well run, innovative company. This was largely a result of self-created businesses or ventures that were made "off the balance sheet." These side businesses would sell stock, reporting profits, but not reporting losses. "Treating these businesses "off the balance sheet" meant that Enron pretended that these businesses were autonomous, separate firms. But, if the new business made money, Enron would report it as income. If the new business lost money or borrowed money, the losses and debt were not reported by Enron" (mgmtguru.com). As the Management Guru website explains, these tactics were alls designed to make Enron look like a more profitable company and to give it a higher stock price.

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).

Corporate malfeasance has earned a place among the defining themes of the last decade and a half, helping to give birth to the global recession and the Occupy Wall Street movement. Enron, a Houston based commodities, energy, and service corporation, created arguably one of the worst scandals of the past two decades. Due to reporting tactics implemented by Chief Executive Officer Ken Law and Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling, which hid huge debts from the company’s balance sheet, the company filed for bankruptcy, shareholders lost $74 billion, thousands of employees and investors lost their retirement accounts, and many employees lost their jobs. Before the accounting scandal became public in 2001 due to whistleblower and Vice President

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.

a. Stockholders at first reaped tremendous gains from their investments in Enron stock, because the company’s value rose a lot of quicker than market averages throughout the late Nineteen Nineties. In 2001, because the stock value folded, investors lost $70 billion in value. Each individual and institutional shareholders were hurt. Significantly blasted were Enron workers whose 401(k) retirement plans were heavily endowed in their company’s stock. Even shareholders who failed to own any Enron stock were hurt, as stock costs fell across the board within the wake of the scandal as investors doubted the integrity of the many companies’ monetary reports.