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Enron's Kenneth Lay Dies
Don420 writes "This morning the biggest corporate criminal in modern history, Kenneth Lay, died of a massive coronary before he could receive his sentence. Lay was found guilty of being in charge of the scheme that had many lose their live-savings through a scheme of complex offshore holdings and is to thank for our having to live with Sarbanes-Oxely." From the article: "Enron filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 after investigators found it had used partnerships to conceal more than $1 billion in debt and inflate profits. Enron's downfall cost 4,000 employees their jobs and many of them their life savings, and led to billions of dollars of losses for investors."
He did not grow Enron from nothing, it was simply a merger of two large energy corporations:
"Lay worked in the early '70s as a federal energy regulator. He then became undersecretary for the Department of the Interior before he returned to the business world as an executive at Florida Gas. By the Reagan administration, when energy was deregulated, Lay was already an energy company executive and he took advantage of the new climate by merging Houston Natural Gas Co. with Nebraska-based Inter-North to form Enron in 1985."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Lay
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
A lot of people lost their ... life savings because of him.
Nobody was obligated to put their own money into Enron's 401k plan (and therefore into Enron stock). Anyone who invested more than 15% of their portfolio into it was probably warned several times of the risk in doing so. He may certainly have been responsible for them losing *their Enron stock's value*, but they had no excuse for making it such a big chunk of their investments. Ken Lay did not make them invest such a huge fraction in Enron.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
At the end of the dotcom bubble I was working in downtown San Francisco. We used to have rolling blackouts and everybody would leave the building for a couple hours and enjoy themselves. Anyways, the servers weren't running and nobody was making money (except for the CEOs, they always make money.)
I asked my brother, an electrician at a Bay Area biotech, what the hell was going on and he didn't know.
It turns out that this fucking company Enron was turning off power-plants willy-nilly so they could profit off the spike in energy consumption somehow. So, while hospitals and grandma Millie are sitting in the dark these jackasses in Texas are laughing their asses off all the way to the bank.
It also turns out that our pussy governor could have sent the National Guard to ONE fucking powerplant and took it over. When the assholes from Enron call to take it offline they would pick up the phone: "could you turn the power off so we can spike the grid and make a lot of money?" "Uhhhh, this is Col. Soandso of the California National Guard. Who's this?" "Nevermind..." hangup. (Enron stops shenanigans.)
Oh well, Ken Lay, may you rot in the eighth circle of Dante's Hell: reserved for those guilty of deliberate fraudulent evil.
Enron is very relevant to the huge amount of auditing infrastructure that so many IT grunts were required to add to their corporate systems in the past few years.
And even then, do not believe it. It is fairly easy to substitue another body with a little bit of makeup. If you really wish to know, then you only have one way to know; DNA.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
So is everyone in elected office. It's a common trait among perps in the con game.
Care to tell us all exactly what he did to deserve punishment? I ask only because I think you don't personally know.
He was the CEO of a company that defrauded thousands of people?
Nice trick with that book though; it was written in response to the SOX laws which came about AFTER the Enron fiasco. So implying that this guy couldn't act morally because of the law is bogus.
There goes that theory, unless everyone at the hospital including the coroner is being brought in on the conspiracy.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
After seeing "The Smartest Guys in the Room" and learning about how he screwed honest people out of their life-long savings, this SOB should be rotting in a jail cell. One worker in the movie had $300,000 in company stock (his entire life savings) in his 401k - and had to cash it in for $1200. The guy was in his late 50's. I'm just sad nobody choked him like a bitch before he died. A heart attack was just too easy for this scumbag.
...and that they[work collegues] felt devoted to him.
...needed when ones business growth is to progress beyond stage three.
These devottees are otherwise known as faithfull lieutenants.
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
Ugh! Right where I was planning to dance
Also see how the present administration was complicit in the California Energy Crisis.
Explain please. Sounds like your spreading FUD. Wiki covers this issue fairly well here.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's the cost of compliance that is so bad. If you are a huge company, say Exxon, with its $10 Billion quarterly profit, then you can afford to pay for the accountants, lawyers, IT auditors, and others needed to assure compliance. I would guess that Exxon pays $10M/quarter for this, about $0.1% of their profits. But if you are a software company with $25M in annual revenue and maybe $2M in annual profit before taxes, with hopes of going public, then the cost of SarbOx compliance makes it nearly impossible to do so. It's hard to spend less than $500K annually and satisfy the SarbOx requirements. For a small company, this amounts to at least 25% of earnings, which reduces the likely value of their stock, since investors tend to focus on price/earnings ratios. I was told that SarbOx was an important reason why JBoss decided to be acquired rather than try to go public on their own.
"The reason why these people ignored this bedrock of finance is because Enron's stock once did quite well."
7 /401k/index.html?pn=2/
If I remember correctly, employees were "encouraged" to show their loyalty by investing a lot of their 401k's in Enron.
Also:
"Enron limited employees' investment freedom from the start by matching their contributions only with company stock and by preventing employees from selling that stock until age 50."
http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/feature/2002/01/1
Well, I know you will be shocked (SHOCKED!) to find out that a good chunk of dough (to the tune of several hundred-thousand dollars) went to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney.
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
I doubt it was cholesterol either... as he would have been on any medication around to stop that.
It seems to me that you're suggesting that people who are on cholesterol medication never die of coronary heart disease. Really, they only lower the mortality rate by about 10%, making them less effective than a good cholesterol reduction diet. Of course, neither is a magic bullet - he could have been on Lipitor and eating Ornish and he'd still be under a high risk of dying from heart disease if he already had off-the-wall cholesterol levels.
It's a lesson learned. The stock devaluation was hard to swallow, but, as you say, made by greed. What about the part where we were locked out of our 401K accounts when the stock was worth $22 a share and plummeting? We could have recovered some, or at least stopped the bleeding. By the time we were allowed back into our accounts to redistribute the money, there wasn't any left.
The Spoon
Updated 6/28/2011
Don't mod up for creativity! It's Byron, the original is:
Posterity will ne'er survey
A nobler grave than this:
Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:
Stop, traveller, and piss.
The meter and intention were too perfect to pass on though. Byron really is excellent though, and well worth a read.
It says right in the article "In a statement, the Pitkin County Sheriff's office said a coroner's autopsy is pending and autopsy results will be available later this week."
No sig for you!!
I'm already jaded as it is, bu tthis is like a cherry on top of the whipped cream.
I'd hate for "Kenny-Boy" to get the last laugh on America, you know, by dying early.