My father, who ran a hardware store, said "you can't cheat an honest man." I was a well-paid speaker at a gathering of Enron public relations folks about a half-year before the firm's collapse. I still have a copy of their ethics guide. I was also hoping to use the Enron story to teach my journalism students a bit about financial reporting... how to read balance sheets and income statements.
Problem: I could not figure out why all the partnerships (raptors) existed AS PARTNERSHIPS. Now, I'm supposed to be pretty good at this. My financial models are probably the.most widely used on earth by broadband deployers. I've held finance committee posts on every board or advisory committee I've ever served on... including one of your startups and Columbia University Senate.
So I turned to a cousin, a top tax attorney, and asked him about Enron. Were the Raptors only a tax dodge and thus illegal under IRS rules? Worse than that, he said. They kept massive debt off the balance sheet of Enron itself, hiding debt from stock investors. At the time, Enron had the 7th largest stock value on the NY exchange.
"Your clients are lucky to have you," I said.
"When I tell them I will not be a party to helping them invest in Enron, they get angry and go elsewhere," he said. "I've lost clients."
Enron collapsed a few months later. Cousin never got his Enron-eating clients back. I ended up using Amazon (which was about to report its first profitable year) as my classroom case study. I helped start a broadband magazine a year later and found that broadband deployers in Texas had profited greatly by buying the fiber-optic cable that Enton raptors had laid down all over the state. The sales price was often 2 or 3 cents on each dollar of original cost.
Also found out that you CAN cheat an honest man. Your startup, on whose advisory board I served, was hired by Wells-Fargo to create an accurate customer-tracking data utility. Lower-level W-F managers obstructed the project, keeping it from completion. Your company closed down. Some months later we found out the reason for the obstruction: the new system would have exposed their scheme that had created millions of new services assigned to existing bank customers -- services the customers were charged for, but never knew even existed.
W-F was recently fined $5 billion for more skullduggery -- two decades later. Ick.
My father, who ran a hardware store, said "you can't cheat an honest man." I was a well-paid speaker at a gathering of Enron public relations folks about a half-year before the firm's collapse. I still have a copy of their ethics guide. I was also hoping to use the Enron story to teach my journalism students a bit about financial reporting... how to read balance sheets and income statements.
Problem: I could not figure out why all the partnerships (raptors) existed AS PARTNERSHIPS. Now, I'm supposed to be pretty good at this. My financial models are probably the.most widely used on earth by broadband deployers. I've held finance committee posts on every board or advisory committee I've ever served on... including one of your startups and Columbia University Senate.
So I turned to a cousin, a top tax attorney, and asked him about Enron. Were the Raptors only a tax dodge and thus illegal under IRS rules? Worse than that, he said. They kept massive debt off the balance sheet of Enron itself, hiding debt from stock investors. At the time, Enron had the 7th largest stock value on the NY exchange.
"Your clients are lucky to have you," I said.
"When I tell them I will not be a party to helping them invest in Enron, they get angry and go elsewhere," he said. "I've lost clients."
Enron collapsed a few months later. Cousin never got his Enron-eating clients back. I ended up using Amazon (which was about to report its first profitable year) as my classroom case study. I helped start a broadband magazine a year later and found that broadband deployers in Texas had profited greatly by buying the fiber-optic cable that Enton raptors had laid down all over the state. The sales price was often 2 or 3 cents on each dollar of original cost.
Also found out that you CAN cheat an honest man. Your startup, on whose advisory board I served, was hired by Wells-Fargo to create an accurate customer-tracking data utility. Lower-level W-F managers obstructed the project, keeping it from completion. Your company closed down. Some months later we found out the reason for the obstruction: the new system would have exposed their scheme that had created millions of new services assigned to existing bank customers -- services the customers were charged for, but never knew even existed.
W-F was recently fined $5 billion for more skullduggery -- two decades later. Ick.