Originally Posted by xTYBALTx

I agree 100% that the people in question committed crimes and are deserving of punishment. However, I do not buy the "destroyed lives" argument. The company failed because it wasn't making money, not because of the fraud. If anything, the fraud actually lengthened the amount of time Enron employees recieved compensation by keeping the business running longer. Had the management been transparant about Enron's financial situation, the company simply would have gone bankrupt several months earlier.

Additionally, all this talk about "stealing hundreds of millions of dollars" is hyperbolic. True, the management took large bonuses during the same time that they were cooking the books, but their compensation was not outrageous (in dollar terms. the fact that they were being compensated for fraudelent and non-existent profits is most certainly outrageous!). But the idea that these executives somehow drained the company for their own well being is simply incorrect. The executives hoped to cover up Enron's losses, make the company profitable again, and hope nobody ever noticed. That's fraud - not even the worst sort of fraud. It most certainly is not robbery. It is especially entertaining to note that had their scheme worked out, the employees at Enron would have kept their jobs and pensions.

If we're going to talk about the weighty issues of crime and punishment, lets at least be frank about it.

Originally Posted by xTYBALTx

Looks like someone's too lazy to RTFA?

Originally Posted by THE ARTICLE

"When [financial journalist] Weil had finished his reporting [two years prior to Enron's collapse], he called Enron for comment. "They had their chief accounting officer and six or seven people fly up to Dallas," Weil says. They met in a conference room at the Journal's offices. The Enron officials acknowledged that the money they said they earned was virtually all money that they hoped to earn. Weil and the Enron officials then had a long conversation about how certain Enron was about its estimates of future earnings... Of all the moments in the Enron unravelling, this meeting is surely the strangest. The prosecutor in the Enron case told the jury to send Jeffrey Skilling to prison because Enron had hidden the truth: You're "entitled to be told what the financial condition of the company is," the prosecutor had said. But what truth was Enron hiding here? Everything Weil learned for his Enron exposé came from Enron, and when he wanted to confirm his numbers the company's executives got on a plane and sat down with him in a conference room in Dallas."

...

"Enron's S.P.E.s were, by any measure, evidence of extraordinary recklessness and incompetence. But you can't blame Enron for covering up the existence of its side deals. It didn't; it disclosed them. The argument against the company, then, is more accurately that it didn't tell its investors enough about its S.P.E.s. But what is enough? Enron had some three thousand S.P.E.s, and the paperwork for each one probably ran in excess of a thousand pages. It scarcely would have helped investors if Enron had made all three million pages public. What about an edited version of each deal? Steven Schwarcz, a professor at Duke Law School, recently examined a random sample of twenty S.P.E. disclosure statements from various corporations—that is, summaries of the deals put together for interested parties—and found that on average they ran to forty single-spaced pages. So a summary of Enron's S.P.E.s would have come to a hundred and twenty thousand single-spaced pages. What about a summary of all those summaries? That's what the bankruptcy examiner in the Enron case put together, and it took up a thousand pages. Well, then, what about a summary of the summary of the summaries? That's what the Powers Committee put together. The committee looked only at the "substance of the most significant transactions," and its accounting still ran to two hundred numbingly complicated pages and, as Schwarcz points out, that was "with the benefit of hindsight and with the assistance of some of the finest legal talent in the nation.""