More info. on Enron's Cliff Baxter...
msnbc.com
The mention of Baxter in the Watkins-Lay Memo:
" “Cliff Baxter complained mightily to Skilling and all who would listen about the inappropriateness of our transactions,” "
BAXTER, 43, WAS vice chairman of Enron when he resigned in May 2001, several months before the energy company’s collapse. Sugar Land police department spokeswoman Patricia Whitty said Baxter was found inside his car early on Friday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head, and a suicide note at his side. There were no apparent signs of foul play, she said.
Enron confirmed the death in a short statement: "We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of our friend and colleague, Cliff Baxter."
Enron spokesman Mark Palmer had no additional comment.
The Enron Fiasco
A company's rise and fall
• Former Enron executive Baxter commits suicide
• Enron-type accounting problems widespread, ex-SEC chief says
• WSJ: Hit for J.P. Morgan could be huge
• Enron was warned about misleading investors
• WSJ: Enron execs' benefits kept flowing
• Full coverage
Baxter’s body was found at 2:23 a.m. local time Friday in between two medians in a residential area in Sugar Land. He was in the driver’s seat of the vehicle and a police officer stopped to check on him after noticing the parked car.
Jim Richard, a Fort Bend County justice of the peace, ruled Baxter’s death a suicide mid-morning Friday.
“We don’t have any other indication other than it being suicide,” said Sugar Land police Capt. David Marcaurele.
Baxter was one of 29 former and current Enron executives and board members named as defendants in a federal lawsuit. Plaintiffs’ lawyers said the executives made $1.1 billion by selling Enron stock between October 1998 and November 2001.
It said Baxter had sold 577,436 shares for $35.2 million.
Baxter had reportedly feuded with then-Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling over the propriety of off-balance sheet transactions that hid billions in debt and ultimately triggered the once-mighty Houston company’s spiral into the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
“Cliff Baxter complained mightily to Skilling and all who would listen about the inappropriateness of our transactions,” Enron whistle-blower Sherron Watkins wrote to Chairman and CEO Ken Lay, who resigned on Wednesday, in an Aug. 14 letter. Watkins identified Baxter in a section of her letter stating there is “a veil of secrecy around LJM and Raptor,” another entity involved in the partnerships.
Watkins’ letter to Lay stated that “we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals” unless the company halted practices that eventually sent it into bankruptcy. |
