Pity the poor Lays, down to their last several million dollars
The Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday, February 2, 2002
The wife of Enron's former boss has a tale of woe to tell, reports Mark Riley from New York.
It is almost as if there is a wedding vow designed expressly for the wives of America's rich and famous scoundrels.
"Do you (insert name here) promise to love, honour and obey your husband all the days of your life ... and defend him outrageously on national morning television against persuasive evidence of his monstrous dishonesty?"
Tammy Faye Baker said "I do" to that one. So did Hillary Clinton.
"There's this vast right-wing conspiracy," the former first lady said in her now infamous TV interview in the opening days of the Monica Lewinsky affair.
Americans were coughing up their corn flakes again this week when Linda Lay, wife of the former Enron chairman, Ken "Kenny Boy" Lay, gave an exclusive interview on breakfast television in which she painted her husband as a victim rather than a perpetrator of America's worst ever corporate collapse.
Lay had known nothing of the complex pea-and-thimble trick his company had played to hide a crippling mountain of debt from unwitting investors, regulators and the tax office, she said.
The way she saw it, her husband was just another innocent casualty of the energy giant's collapse and one who was being treated with gross unfairness by the media.
"Nobody even really knows what the truth is yet. The only truth I know 100per cent for sure is that my husband is an honest, decent, moral human being who would do absolutely nothing wrong."
Apparently, Mr Lay was simply doing the honest, decent thing when he sold $US160million ($315million) of his personal shareholding while flying the doomed company Icarus-like into the centre of the sun.
And the reason he told employees and investors to hold onto their shares as Enron plummeted inexorably back towards Earth was that he truly believed it would fly again.
Granted, he had cashed out of the stock himself and had been warned by at least two top executives that his high-flying company had lost its wings, its tail and all its feathers, but you know these corporate aviators - they are incurable romantics.
The interview was the idea of a public relations consultant engaged by the family in an attempt to re-humanise Mr Lay before he goes in front of Congress on Monday to answer questions about the spectacular collapse of Enron, once America's seventh-largest company.
Mr Lay declined to be interviewed, citing legal advice. Instead, he trotted out his present wife, and his five children from previous marriages, to shave the horns and cloven feet from his public profile.
While the interview was being recorded he took another leaf out of the Bill Clinton playbook and went and prayed with the Rev Jesse Jackson, who later compared the former Enron chief with Job.
"Evidently, Jackson was thinking of the part in the story where God drops the hammer on Job because Job's whole sheep-herding operation was a charade to launder losses in the fig trade," the San Jose Mercury News wrote this week, in an editorial typical of the general disbelief at the Lay family's attempt to spin itself into favour.
Mrs Lay tried to show in the interview that she and her husband were just like the thousands of other American families who had lost everything in the Enron collapse. Alas, her PR consultants should have spent more time sanding back her phraseology before placing her in the spotlight.
"We're fighting for liquidity," she told the mums and dads of morning television land. To the average American, liquidity is something to drink or flush or wash the family dog in. But for the Lays it means a state of being cash-poor and asset-stinking-rich.
Ken Lay pulled in about $US300million in salary, bonuses and options over the past four years at Enron - say $US1.5million a week.
The Lays retain at least $US8million in Compaq and Eli Lilly shares and $US25million in real estate, including four homes in the upscale ski town of Aspen, Colorado, a collection of undeveloped lots in Texas, and a $US7.1million luxury flat with five bedrooms and six bathrooms in Houston that they will retain under Texas law irrespective of whether Mr Lay is eventually found guilty of criminal conduct and asked to pay back some of his largesse.
Then there are a $US25million severance package Mr Lay is owed by the company, an unknown amount of other investments, and the trivial matter of three yachts, a Mercedes G500 and a new, top-of-the-line, Land Rover.
Just your average, broke American family.
The Lays' disastrous PR ploy was yet another human tragedy in a debacle that has already produced hundreds of stories of personal woe from ruined employees and investors and the suicide of a former senior Enron executive who could not live with his conscience any longer.
At the political level, the scandal continues to gather pace as the Vice-President, Dick Cheney, digs the White House into a damaging legal battle over his refusal to release documents outlining the level of influence Enron executives had in the formulation of the Bush Administration's energy policy.
George Bush is desperately trying to distance himself from the stench of the collapse after years of accepting hefty Enron donations for his various political campaigns. The President wedged a veiled reference to Enron between anti-terrorism tirades in a speech on Thursday at the start of the southern sweep of his State of the Union tour.
"Companies should include all profits and losses on their balance sheets," he said, in a jolting segue from the war in Afghanistan to the threat of nuclear attack.
The Lays were facing a nuclear-like attack of their own at week's end, with news that O.J. Simpson's flamboyant defence lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, would act for Enron employees who are suing Mr Lay and other executives.
Unlike Mrs Lay, Mr Cochran is renowned for his language skills, particularly his rhymes.
"If the glove don't fit, you must acquit," he told the O.J. jury.
The Lays are shuddering in their $US 7.1million pauper's flat this weekend at the thought of what Mr Cochran might find to rhyme with "liquidity".
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