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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DuckTapeSunroof who wrote (225997)	2/7/2002 9:50:01 PM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 769670

You once again took the most restictive quote. Read these: Experts say that the S.E.C. rulings unshackled the company from significant accounting restraints and business dealings between the Enron companies and their executives. The 1997 exemption, in particular, cleared the path for the company to both expand overseas and make greater use of the special partnerships that have caused the company so much turmoil. "From a regulatory standpoint, this raises a flag," said Joseph V. Del Raso, a former official at the S.E.C. in the 1980's and an expert on the Investment Company Act. "It gave them carte blanche to go all over the world and set up subsidiaries and affiliated entities that would have been prohibited under the act." Another expert on the act, Mark A. Sargent, the dean of the Villanova law school, agreed. "The Enron structure was not a single company with stockholders engaged in operations like an ordinary corporation," he said. "It was similar to an investment company with investments in a bunch of different companies. The decision to exempt those from the kind of protections to investors is now coming home to roost."... ....A lawyer who represented Enron said that although the company and its foreign subsidiaries had actually controlled many of their overseas ventures, like power plants, they were unable to have a 51 percent stake in them because of local rules and political constraints. In 1996, Congress rewrote parts of the act but refused to grant an exemption to Enron because of significant opposition from both the S.E.C. and the Investment Company Institute, the main trade organization for the mutual fund industry and a strong supporter of the law. Mr. Barbash said that in 1996, Congressional aides advised Enron's lawyers to seek an exemption directly from the agency. The company decided to retain Joel H. Goldberg, a former director of the investment management division at the S.E.C., who said today that he did not know how the company came to hire him. An Enron official said the company had retained Mr. Goldberg knowing that he had previously been Mr. Barbash's boss and was his predecessor at the S.E.C. Mr. Goldberg had been Mr. Barbash's supervisor at the S.E.C. in the 1980's and the Labor Department in the 1970's. The two lawyers are now partners at the international law firm of Shearman & Sterling. Mr. Goldberg said he viewed the exemption as a narrowly tailored one intended to permit the company to continue its overseas projects. But he acknowledged that had the company not been granted the exemption, it would have been constrained from using any partnerships or shifting debt off the books in its foreign operations. "I guess on the one hand, if they had been subject to the Investment Company Act, they probably could not have done these transactions," he said. "The subsidiaries would not have existed, and they would have had to make another plan.".... nytimes.com As others have remarked, your irrelevant opinion is off point. Ipso facto, the SEC exemption made the Enron fiasco possible. Obviously you have no background in the law or business.