Enron's Lay tells employees to buy stock, while he secretly sells. Let the people manage their own retirement funds, I say!
From NYT -- BUSINESS booms are famous for hiding underlying problems in an economy. It takes a recession to make them obvious. Now, like melting snow, this recession is uncovering a glaring inequality in the system the United States has gradually adopted over the last 20 years to prepare its workers for retirement.
The Enron Corporation is the showcase. Its top executives are walking away with money in their pockets for their own retirement, while their employees have watched their pension savings disappear because Enron's stock price plunged
From the UK Telegraph...
as it emerged that Kenneth Lay, the chairman and chief executive of Enron, was urging employees to buy more shares in the energy trading giant just two months before it collapsed into bankruptcy. In an online forum with employees on September 26, Lay told workers to "talk up the stock and talk positively about Enron to your family and friends".
Lay's comments were made weeks after Sherron Watkins, an Enron vice president, had warned him in an anonymous letter that she feared the group could "implode in a wave of accounting scandals".
Congressional investigators examining why Enron suddenly collapsed have already concluded that some of its executives, as well as Andersen staff, deliberately sought to hide the financial problems that led to the world's biggest corporate bankruptcy.
In the September forum Lay told employees, thousands of whom had invested most of their retirement savings in Enron shares, that the group's third quarter was "looking great" and that the company was "fundamentally sound". |
