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Non-Tech : The ENRON Scandal -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Charles Tutt who wrote (233)	1/14/2002 12:25:15 PM
From: Mephisto	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 5185

" The ethical - maybe criminal - core of the scandal is that Enron trapped its employees into a 'stock-lock', whereby they were not allowed to sell share options bought by way of savings. When the company collapsed, they lost everything. Meanwhile, Enron's executives - blessed by inside information and foresight - made a killing by scrambling to sell shares before the price collapsed. The victims of Enron's rise and fall were regular employees who opted to join a savings plan by investing in their employer - and why not? With soaring energy prices and giddy profits, the share value quadrupled between 1997 and January last year. The catch was they were not allowed to sell. They were people like Pat Betteridge, of the subsidiary Portland General Electric company in Oregon, who remembers grand claims by Enron chief executive Kenneth Lay on a visit north: 'We like to think of ourselves,' he bragged, 'as the Microsoft of the energy world.' Betteridge used his $300,000 retirement savings to buy 3,500 shares - now worth not a cent. 'If I was hired to do electrical work and I botched it as bad as them,' he says, 'I'd either be doing time or get my licence yanked.' The beneficiaries of the company's surge to power were those who boarded the wheel of perpetual motion that binds the Bush administration to the energy industry. Then the company's brass even tried to make their fortune out of its fall as well." The above is an excerpt from the article, "Price of power " By Ed Vulliamy Sunday January 13, 2002 The Observer See:http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=16905982