74-Milliarden-Dollar-Katastrophe: Wie Jeff Skilling Enron in 16 Jahren tötete

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Am 2. Dezember 2011 meldete Enron die größte Insolvenz in der amerikanischen Geschichte an. Ein Vermögen von 63 Milliarden Dollar. Zwanzigtausend Arbeitsplätze. Neunzig Tage vom Höhepunkt bis zum Nullpunkt.

Dies ist die Geschichte, wie ein Pipeline-Unternehmen in Houston zum wertvollsten Energiebetrug der Geschichte wurde. Wie es fünf Jahre gedauert hat, die Männer anzuklagen, die es gebaut haben. Und warum der Vorstandsvorsitzende starb, bevor das Urteil ihn berühren konnte.

Twenty thousand Enron employees lost their jobs in the final weeks. Most lost their retirement savings too, because the Enron four oh one k held sixty percent in Enron stock and was frozen during the collapse. The average loss per employee was three hundred thousand dollars. Total shareholder losses reached seventy-four billion. The chairman walked away with two hundred million in cashed-out stock. The chief financial officer walked away with forty-five million in personal payments from the off-balance-sheet entities he ran. The chief executive officer kept ninety million of the stock he had sold while telling employees to buy more. By the time the trial began in two thousand and six, Arthur Andersen, the auditor that signed every fraudulent statement, was already gone. Eighty-five thousand Andersen employees had lost their jobs worldwide because of one Houston account.

Houston, nineteen eighty-five. Kenneth Lay merged Houston Natural Gas with InterNorth and renamed the new company Enron. Lay was an energy economist with a doctorate. He had run the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission under the Nixon administration. He understood the rules better than the rule-writers did. And he understood that the rules were about to change.

The early nineties was the decade of deregulation. Congress was opening up the natural gas market. Then electricity. Lay positioned Enron not as a producer or a pipeline, but as a trader. The middle man. The market maker. In nineteen ninety, he hired a McKinsey consultant named Jeffrey Skilling to build the trading floor. Skilling was a Harvard MBA, top of his class, a man who liked to win arguments by being the loudest person in the room. He arrived with one idea that would change everything.

Skilling argued that Enron should adopt what is called mark-to-market accounting. Normally, when a pipeline company signs a twenty-year supply contract, it books the cash as it arrives, month by month, year by year. Mark-to-market lets you book the entire estimated lifetime profit on the day the contract is signed. The future profit, today, on paper, even before a single dollar has changed hands. The Securities and Exchange Commission approved Enron's request to use mark-to-market on natural gas futures contracts on January thirtieth, nineteen ninety-two. It was the first time a non-financial company had been allowed to do this. Enron was no longer in the energy business. Enron was in the storytelling business. The stories were called earnings.

The stock took off. Between nineteen ninety-six and two thousand, Enron's reported revenue grew from thirteen billion dollars to one hundred billion. That is a seven hundred and fifty percent expansion in four years. The energy industry typically grows at two or three percent annually. Wall Street did not ask how. Wall Street asked for more. Andrew Fastow joined as chief financial officer in nineteen ninety-eight. Lou Pai ran the trading floor. Together they built a machine.

Here is the trick at the center of Enron. Mark-to-market lets you book paper profit on day one. But the contract still has to deliver real cash in the future. If it does not deliver, the paper profit becomes a paper loss. To hide the losses, Fastow built off-balance-sheet entities. He called them special purpose entities. He gave them science fiction names. JEDI. Chewco. LJM. The Star Wars references were the point. Inside the company, the entities were treated as a joke. Outside the company, they hid hundreds of millions in debt.

The mechanism worked like this. Enron would set up a partnership, technically separate from Enron, and sell it a losing asset. The asset moved off Enron's books. The partnership took the loss. Enron took a fee. Because the partnership was funded by debt that Enron itself guaranteed, the risk never actually went anywhere. It just changed addresses. Fastow personally ran these partnerships. He personally took the fees. He told the board he was getting paid forty-five million dollars over the life of the structures. The board approved it.

Then Enron started doing deals with itself. The most infamous involved Blockbuster Video. In July of two thousand, Enron and Blockbuster signed a twenty-year agreement to deliver streaming movies on demand. Enron booked one hundred and ten million dollars in profit on the announcement. The technology did not exist. The market did not exist. The two companies abandoned the deal eight months later. Enron kept the profit on its books anyway.

This was the asset-light strategy. Skilling sold off the actual pipelines and power plants. He replaced them with trading positions whose value was whatever Enron said it was. By two thousand and one, Enron was reporting one hundred and thirty-eight billion in revenue in nine months. Sixth on the Fortune Global five hundred. Most innovative company in America, six years in a row, according to Fortune.

The stock chart told the story Wall Street wanted to hear. Forty dollars in nineteen ninety-eight. Sixty in nineteen ninety-nine. Ninety dollars and seventy-five cents on August twenty-third, two thousand. Sixty-three billion dollars in market capitalization. Jeffrey Skilling was named chief executive officer in February two thousand and one. He was forty-seven years old and his personal stock was worth more than two hundred million dollars.

Kenneth Lay had moved to the role of chairman. He had also moved closer to the White House. Lay had been one of George W. Bush's largest political donors for a decade. Enron had named the new Houston Astros baseball stadium Enron Field. The trading floor culture had become its own kind of religion. Rip every counterparty. Push every analyst. Threaten every journalist. The internal rule was simple. Make the number, every quarter, no matter what.

The number-making reached its lowest point during the California energy crisis. Starting in two thousand, the deregulated California electricity market began to break. Wholesale prices spiked from thirty dollars per megawatt-hour to over one thousand. Rolling blackouts hit the state. People died in nursing homes and hospitals during heat waves. Enron's traders ran strategies they had given names like Death Star, Get Shorty, and Fat Boy. Death Star moved electricity in circles across the grid to collect transmission payments without delivering any actual power. Get Shorty submitted bids the company never intended to fulfill. The trading room recordings were later released by federal investigators. The traders laughed about grandmothers losing power. They called the state of California stupid. Skilling, in a public appearance, said the difference between California and the Titanic was that at least the lights were on when the Titanic went down.

It was a joke that did not survive March two thousand and one. That month, a Fortune magazine reporter named Bethany McLean published a piece with a simple title. Is Enron Overpriced? McLean asked a question that nobody on Wall Street had bothered to ask. How does this company actually make money? She could not figure it out from the public filings. Neither could the analysts she interviewed. She called Enron and was told her question was unethical. Skilling called her editor and tried to kill the piece. The piece ran anyway.

Five months later, on August fourteenth, two thousand and one, Jeffrey Skilling abruptly resigned as chief executive officer. He cited personal reasons. The stock began to slide. On October sixteenth, Enron announced a six hundred and eighteen million dollar loss for the quarter and a one point two billion dollar reduction in shareholder equity, blamed on the Fastow partnerships. On October twenty-second, the Securities and Exchange Commission opened a formal investigation. On October twenty-fourth, Fastow was fired. The stock was at thirty-three eighty-four. On November eighth, Enron restated four years of earnings, admitting that five hundred and eighty-six million dollars of previously reported profit had never existed.

On November twenty-eighth, Dynegy, a Houston rival that had agreed to rescue Enron with a low-priced merger, walked away. The stock closed at sixty-one cents. On December second, Enron filed for Chapter eleven bankruptcy protection. Sixty-three point four billion in assets. The largest bankruptcy in United States history at that moment. It would be exceeded the following year by WorldCom, another mark-to-market fraud built on the same playbook.

Inside Enron, the collapse moved fast. The four oh one k retirement plan was frozen for a transition between record-keepers between October twenty-ninth and November twelfth. During those two weeks the stock fell from fifteen dollars to nine. By the time employees could sell, most of their savings were gone. Twenty thousand people lost their jobs over the following months. Average four oh one k loss per employee, three hundred thousand dollars. Total shareholder losses, seventy-four billion.

Arthur Andersen had audited Enron's books every year for sixteen years. When the Securities and Exchange Commission investigation began, partners at the Houston Andersen office ordered the destruction of tons of Enron-related documents. The shredders ran for three weeks. In June two thousand and two, Andersen was convicted of obstruction of justice. The conviction was technically overturned by the Supreme Court three years later, but by then it did not matter. Andersen had already lost almost every public client. Eighty-five thousand Andersen employees worldwide were out of work. A ninety-year-old accounting firm, dead in eight months because of one Houston account.

Congress responded with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, signed on July thirtieth, two thousand and two. Sarbanes-Oxley required chief executives to personally certify the accuracy of their financial statements. It created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board. It expanded penalties for shredding documents in federal investigations. It was the most significant corporate accountability law since the New Deal. The price tag in compliance and audit fees has run into the hundreds of billions over two decades. Whether it has prevented the next Enron is an open question.

The prosecutions took years. Andrew Fastow pleaded guilty in January two thousand and four to securities fraud and wire fraud. He cooperated. He got six years and served five and a half. Lou Pai cashed out two hundred and seventy million dollars before the collapse and was never criminally charged. Skilling and Lay were indicted together on February nineteenth, two thousand and four. The trial began in January two thousand and six in Houston. It lasted four months. On May twenty-fifth, two thousand and six, the jury convicted Jeffrey Skilling on all nineteen counts. Conspiracy. Securities fraud. Wire fraud. Insider trading. Lay was convicted on all six counts against him.

Six weeks later, on July fifth, two thousand and six, Kenneth Lay died of a heart attack at his vacation home in Colorado. Under a United States legal doctrine called abatement ab initio, when a defendant dies before exhausting appeals, the conviction is vacated. Lay's conviction was erased. His estate was protected from civil judgments. He died a free man on paper, eight weeks before he was scheduled to be sentenced.

Jeffrey Skilling was sentenced to twenty-four years and four months in federal prison. He served at the Federal Prison Camp in Montgomery, Alabama, then was transferred to a low-security facility in Englewood, Colorado. In two thousand and thirteen, he reached a deal with prosecutors that reduced his sentence to fourteen years. He was released in February two thousand and nineteen, after twelve years inside. He was sixty-five years old. He started a new energy data company within two years of his release.

This is the receipt. Twenty thousand workers lost their jobs and most of their savings. Seventy-four billion dollars in shareholder value evaporated. Arthur Andersen, an eighty-five thousand person global accounting firm, ceased to exist. One executive served twelve years. One died before he could be sentenced. The chief financial officer who personally ran the off-balance-sheet entities served five and a half years. The trading floor chief cashed out and disappeared.

Enron was not just a fraud. Enron was the proof of concept. Mark-to-market made the future profitable today. Off-balance-sheet entities hid the cost of being wrong. The board approved everything. The auditor signed everything. The Securities and Exchange Commission watched it happen for nine years. The same playbook would surface in WorldCom in two thousand and two. It would surface in Lehman Brothers in two thousand and eight, in Greek sovereign debt the same year, in cryptocurrency exchanges in twenty twenty-two. The names change. The trick stays the same. Recognize the profit early. Hide the loss off the books. Make the number every quarter. Until you cannot.

The Enron lesson is not that one company cheated. The lesson is that the system worked exactly as designed for almost a decade, and the people who built it walked free for five years. The next bankruptcy, somewhere out there right now, is being audited by people who learned from this one. Whether they learned what was wrong, or just learned how to hide it better, is the question that never gets answered until the next ninety days.

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