To: Sully- who wrote (51213 ) 5/9/2002 10:33:49 PM From: stockman_scott Respond to of 65232 Andersen Partner Says He Erased Enron E-Mail By Jeff Franks Thursday May 9, 3:25 pm Eastern Time HOUSTON (Reuters) - An Andersen partner said on Thursday he deleted most Enron Corp.-related e-mails at the height of the energy trading giant's financial problems last year, but that he was simply cleaning up his files and not hiding information from investigators. The testimony by a witness called to the stand by prosecutors appeared to dent the government's accusation that Andersen destroyed thousands of documents to cover its role in Enron's (Other OTC:ENRNQ.PK - news; NYSE:ENE - news) collapse into bankruptcy. The Big Five accounting firm is charged with obstructing justice. Andersen partner Ben Neuhausen said he destroyed 150 to 200 messages a few days after receiving an e-mail from Andersen lawyer Nancy Temple about the firm's document retention policies, but that the events were not related. "In my mind, I was doing normal clean-up. I was not trying to hide the documents from anybody," said Neuhausen, a high- level Andersen manager who was deeply involved in the Enron case as the energy trading giant unraveled last fall amid revelations it used off-balance sheet partnerships to hide debt and inflate profits. "It didn't dawn on me that anybody would have an interest in them." Prosecutors have said Andersen wiped out Enron documents because it feared losing its license to audit public companies after involvement in previous accounting scandals at Waste Management and Sunbeam corporations. The company has lost hundreds of clients since the Enron saga began and is selling off various parts of business to raise cash in hopes of surviving its legal problems. Along with the criminal case, it faces dozens of lawsuits from angry Enron shareholders. Neuhausen was the second Andersen partner in two days to describe document destruction at Andersen as a routine part of business procedure. On Wednesday, James Hecker said the work generated huge amounts of documents that had to be cleaned out periodically. But both also described Enron as an "aggressive client" constantly pushing the limits of accounting rules. They portrayed the Andersen team handling the Enron account, led by David Duncan, as being too close to Enron and too willing to go along with the company's questionable accounting methods. Duncan has pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice by shredding Enron documents so investigators would not see them. He is scheduled to testify later in the trial. "They (Andersen's Enron team) would often push for an aggressive interpretation of the accounting standards," Neuhausen said. "I thought many times, yes, he (Duncan) pushed to excess on aggressive interpretations." Neuhausen is on Andersen's "professional standards group," which is called in to offer opinions when the firm's auditors are uncertain about how to book transactions. He said Duncan and his team defied the group's recommendations about how to treat some of the off-balance sheet transactions that later contributed heavily to Enron's collapse when it turned out they were being used to hide debt and inflate profits. The accounting treatment that Duncan endorsed led to Enron taking a $1.1 billion charge to its third quarter profits, despite intensive Andersen efforts involving some of its top U.S. managers to figure out a way to reduce the losses on paper, he said. "The idea was (to find) an appropriate methodology where the loss wouldn't be that big?" asked prosecutor Andrew Weissman. "That's correct," Neuhausen said. Shortly afterwards, the Duncan-led Enron team realized it had made a separate mistake about how to book the off-balance sheet assets, which forced Enron to write down shareholder equity by $1 billion. "There was a billion-dollar debit that needed to find a home somewhere," Neuhausen said.