http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/24/business/24ENRO.html
“When shown records that laid out the details of the financial returns during his testimony several months ago before the S.E.C., Mr. Skilling was said to have grown agitated as he described his opinion of the information. Had he known the magnitude of the profits, Mr. Skilling was said to have told the regulators, he would have immediately summoned Enron executives involved in the dealings and given them 24 hours to justify such outsize results.”
WhhaAATTT! Why, THESE PROFITS are an OUTRAGE! EXPLAIN YOURSELVES or face the WRATH of… KENNY BOY!
After all, that’s what CEOs do, right? Call employees on the carpet for reporting absurdly high ROI? Yup, that’s why they make the big bucks.
uhh…
The profits Skilling was agitated about were the profits accruing to the non-Enron partners in Enron’s Special Purpose Entities – the off-books ‘partnerships’ Enron set up by the car load to better manage its reported earnings. Some of these partners were Enron employees, acting in their personal capacity, and some were employee friends and relations. In one case, an employee received a ‘profit’ distribution in excess of a million on a cash investment of around 4 thousand — in two months. Nice work if you can get it, althought the technical term for this sort of activity is ‘stealing’.
What I don’t believe is that these partnership activities were unknown to Skilling.
JC
I was aware that the partnerships were generating the profits that got ol’ Jeffs knickers in a twist. If I’m not mistaken, the partnerships that you specifically refer to also generated very much vaster book profits for Enron than for the employees who had the capitalist wisdom to execute the scams with themselves as beneficiaries.
So I think the technical tern is, in fact, “large scale corporate fraud with the goal of creating a recession in time for the 2000 presidential election in collusion with the GOP”. But, then, I could be overstating things, e.g., my use of the word “fraud”.