Fortune columnist Andrew Serwer on Skilling today:
JEFF SKILLING.... Now, THIS was good! Okay people, let's face it. Skilling is, I am afraid, a B.S. artist of the first stripe! He says everything was fine when he left. WRONG! He says he knew nothing about any bad stuff going on Enron. WRONG! He says that it's all about the press, Sherron Watkins, that no one told him about wrongdoing, conflicts
of interest. BULL! The only explanation, the only possible way that he was not lying, is that he is a pyscho! Deluded! Which actually isn't that far out!
So, the bottom line is this: Skilling is lying and deluded. How do I know this? Well two things: 1) It is simply preposterous that Skilling did not know about what was going on in his company. I repeat, preposterous. And 2) When he spoke about Bethany's story, he lied. Rep. Waxman brought up the story (BTW, Congressman, it's pronounced Mc-LANE,
not Mc-Lean!) and Skilling said that Bethany had been working on the story for a week. (Right!) And that he told her it was unethical to run the story because of blah blah blah. He said that when Fastow and the other guys came to Fortune, they spoke to the reporter, not the editors.
Untrue. Editors were there. Then Skilling said that the story was only about the fact that Enron's stock was overpriced, had a high P/E, like other companies at that time. TOTALLY WRONG! Bethany's story basically said that the company was actually becoming a derivatives trading
operation like Goldman Sachs and that there were all kinds of questions about how it made money. So when he was talking about something specifically that I knew about it, he lied.
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