Enron Was The Largest Trader Of Electricity, Energy And Natural Gas

Exploring Enron as it goes from infancy to final explosion, is a valuable mechanism for understanding, how not to organize and manage a company properly. Lay and especially Skilling, were very powerful and persuasive orators. Their charisma radiated out to the employees who followed their leadership with blind obedience. This facilitated a work culture and environment that was toxic, and infectious to everyone involved. It limited any staff diversification internally and fostered a severely overt masculine culture that lead to its downfall eventually.

In August 2000, Enron, an American energy corporation, stock had reached a high of $90.75 per share. However, by November 2001, the price had plummeted to less than a dollar amidst the collapse of one of analysts’ most highly recommended investments. On December 2, 2001, Enron became the largest American corporate bankruptcy to date. The company was deceptive, even fooling Fortune Magazine into naming it “America’s Most Innovative Company” for six consecutive years. The leadership styles of the executive staff fostered a cutthroat and unethical business subculture for the climate which inevitably led to Enron’s demise.

Enron, the natural gas provider turned trader of natural gas commodities and in 1994, electric, was once touted as the seventh largest company in America. Kenneth Lay, founder, began changing Enron from just a provider into a financial energy powerhouse. Lay took advantage of the dot-com boom of the late 1990’s by creating Enron Online, an internet trading platform. Internet stocks were valued at astronomical prices and were all the rage on wall street, who accepted the increasing prices as normal (Investopedia). On December 2, 2001 Enron declared chapter 11 bankruptcy, resulting in the loss of twenty thousand jobs and billions of investor and creditor dollars. Enron, once designated as "America 's Most Innovative Company" by Fortune for six years consecutively, enacted massive financial fraud at the fault of its top level executives: Kenneth Lay, Jeffery Skilling, and Andrew Fastow.

The history of Enron is described in detail in the film “The Smarted Guys in the Room”. According to the film, Enron was founded by Kenneth Lay in 1985, functioning originally as a producer and supplier of natural gas. Enron built and operated power plants and pipelines all over the United States. The company’s wealth expanded quickly due to marketing, promotional strategies and stock price. One of the important aspects noted in the film was Lay’s relationship with the Bush family. This will be described in detail later on and becomes a crucial piece of information during the California energy scandal. Enron’s traders were involved in a scandal early on in the company’s history involving the misappropriation of money and oil betting, this became known as the Valhalla scandal. Lay encouraged traders to continue these activities until the company was near bankrupt and finally the top traders involved were fired and convicted.

Enron was firstly a natural gas pipeline company that combine as the combination of Nebraska and Omaha’s natural gas company, Houston Natural gas and InterNorth. It took 15 years from 1985 to 2000 to climb up into the one of the largest gas company in North America. Behind the successful of the company, it was a story of betrayal and

In 1985 Ken Lay took over a couple of big name gas pipeline companies that came together and thus the infamous Enron Corporation began. They offered a variety of services that were not limited to natural gas but also included electricity, communications, and many energy related services. Together, CEO Jeffrey Skilling, Chairman Ken Lay, and CFO Andrew Fastow were able to bring transformation to Enron. They created a multi-billion dollar Wall Street celebrity out of an electricity and gas company. There was an unusual growth spurt in Enron’s profit of about $69 billion from 1998 to 2000. This caught the attention of an anonymous

Enron began by merger of two Houston pipeline companies in 1985, although as a new company Enron faced a lot of financial difficulties in the starting years, though the company was able to survive these financial problems (Enron Ethics, 2010). In 1988 the deregulation of the electrical power markets came into action and flipped the company from up to down, after deregulation company business updated from delivering energy to becoming an energy broker and soon after this Enron once a company struggling

The story of Enron begins in 1985, with the merger of two pipeline companies, orchestrated by a man named Kenneth L. Lay (Zellner & Forest, 2001). In its 15 years of existence, Enron expanded its

Enron Cooperation, is a company that was based in Houston Texas and was an energy company. This company filed bankruptcy in 2001 leaving a lot of its employees that had no knowledge about what was going on jobless and the company investors losing a lot of money. This was one of biggest companies in the united states, it had a lot of assets all over the country and was operating on a lot of profit that nobody knew how and why. The movie, “Enron, The smartest guy in the room” shows that the company was cooking their books making it look like the company was making a lot of profit. The movie starts by introducing the big scandalous bosses of Enron, Chairman Kenneth Lay, CEO Jeff Skilling and CFO Andrew Fastow. The narrator describes the company as a cooperation that is greedy and fraudulent and later turns bankrupt. We are showed that top executives of Enron held their own personal accounts and transferred a millions of dollars all the time.

By 1993, in spite of the fact that some analysts were criticizing Enron for having high debt, the company was employing financial professionals like Andrew Fastow, assigned by Skilling as a chief financial officer, besides Jeff Skilling who were able to hide Enron’s liabilities and growing the market share of the company on the other hand; Due to this fact, Enron was named for six years between 1996 and 2001 as “America 's Most Innovative Company.”

Enron Corporation was an energy company which founded in 1930 in the United States. At that time, the predecessor of Enron was named as Northern Natural Gas Company which was mainly based in Houston, Texas. In 1985, the Northern Natural Gas Company purchased one of its competitors, Houston Natural Gas Corporation, and renamed as Enron Corporation. During Enron’s operating years, over 30 different types of products are provided around 40 countries in the world, such as power, petrochemicals plastics, steel and pulp and paper. Before the bankruptcy of Enron, it had approximately 20,000 staff around the world and it was the seventh largest American company and one of the largest integrated communication, natural gas, pulp and electricity companies in the world (Referenceforbusiness, 2016).

It is important when looking at this story to start from the beginning and understand how a company with great expectations was plagued by money and the loss of humanity. Enron was founded as an oil company after it merged with two companies, Houston Natural Gas Co. and Omaha-based InterNorth Inc. Kenneth Lay, who had been the CEO of Houston Natural Gas, became Enron 's CEO and chairman, forming Enron into an energy trader and supplier. His main goal was to de-regulate the energy market from the government, so he set out to have Enron’s main mission to accomplish this. In 1987, Enron was faced with

At one time Enron was one of the world’s largest producers of natural gas, oil, and electricity. It also appeared to be one of the most profitable companies, taking shareholders from $19.10 in 1999 to $90.80 by the end of 2000. Enron’s top management answered to a Board of Directors whose responsibility was to question and challenge new partnerships, ventures, and decisions within the company. On several occasions, Andrew Fastow, the company’s Chief Financial Officer approached the board of directors with new investment partnerships which the board approved with very little

Along with selling oil and gas, Enron was an inventive market maker for the sale of gas related products. With market making activities and trading, Enron’s growth went from a simple regional supplier of energy to a global financial

Enron was founded in July of 1985. Enron was an electricity and natural gas company which was a fortune 500 company and it was ranked the sixth largest energy company in the world. Enron’s stock went from a peak of $90.75 to $0.67. This was very detrimental to stockholders. Enron’s top executives sold their stock a long time before the stock price fell. A lot of lower level employees could not sell their stock because of deals they made with the company. This later caused a lot of these employees to lose their life savings and everything they had worked for. Enron used a very complex accounting method to trick the stock market. This method was called “mark to market” accounting. Enron used this method of accounting to predict and project their earnings in a long term period. These earnings were projected based on the long term energy contracts Enron was going to make. This could have been money that was not made at that point. This made Enron’s stock price skyrocket at a very fast pace, making a lot of employees and general public invest in the stock. Enron stock seemed to be a very secure and profitable investment which would make people lots of money. The Fortune 500 company went down very quickly. In August of 2001, the CEO of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling resigned. He randomly resigned and a lot of suspicions arose. His resignation was described to be because of personal reasons.