You're defending ENRON and Arthur Anderson?
OMG. You are one defender of criminality and corruption. No wonder you support Bush so vigorously.
You aren't looking for morality, decency, the rule of law and democracy. You're actually cheerleading for fraud, fascism and total lack of character.
The Justice Dept, under Bush, indicted the company.
===="...In the unanimous decision, the justices said the jury instructions were flawed and too broad to allow jurors to determine whether Andersen had obstructed the government's investigation of Enron, the reports said.
The ruling puts the case back in lower federal courts, but whether Andersen would be granted a new trial is unclear.
The U.S. Justice Department indicted the accounting and consulting firm in March 2002 on one charge of obstruction of justice because employees shredded thousands of documents from its audit of Enron, a Houston-based energy trading firm that collapsed in late 2001 after its complex finances came under scrutiny. Chicago-based Andersen, at one time the country's fifth-largest accounting firm, pleaded innocent to the charge, pointing to its policy of destroying unneeded documentation.
A Houston jury found Andersen guilty in June 2002. The conviction led Anderson to stop conducting public audits and the layoff of more than 25,000 employees across the country.
stlouis.bizjournals.com
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"....It was also the accounting firm for WorldCom, Qwest, and Halliburton. In 1996 Mr. Cheney made a promotional videotape for Anderson. "One of the things I like that they do for us is that, in effect, I get good advice, if you will, from their people based upon how we're doing business and how we're operating, over and above," Mr. Cheney said, "just sort of the normal by-the-books audit arrangement."
Arthur Anderson was also the accountant for a small corporation named for Harken Energy. Therein lies a tale. Fifteen years ago, when George W. Bush was a businessman faced with fiscal failure, Harken Energy bought Spectrum 7, a small company of which Bush was then CEO. Since Spectrum 7 was unprofitable and saddled with debt, the deal brought Harken little gain but the CEO's connections to his father - who happened to be the President of the United States.
Later, although not before our tale is concluded, Harken itself would turn into a company with troubles of its own. But while it appeared healthy, Harken extended generous stock options to the son of President George H. W. Bush. Then the fancy accounting began. Paul Krugman has reported in the New York Times that it involved creating a dummy entity to serve as paper front to then purchase "some of the firm's assets at unrealistically high prices, creating a phantom profit that inflates the stock price, allowing the executives to cash in their stock."
Here is Krugman's description of what happened at Harken Energy, a description which has subsequently been reported all over the nation. "A group of insiders, using money borrowed from Harken itself, paid an exorbitant price for a Harken subsidiary, Aloha Petroleum. That created a $10 million phantom profit, which hid three-quarters of the company's losses in 1989."
Once Harken's stock price was inflated by means of this maneuver - significantly, Arthur Anderson was the accounting firm, and Mr. Bush was on Harken's audit committee - Mr. Bush was able to sell his shares at a large profit shortly before the price of Harken stock dropped substantially. To be specific, on June 22, 1990, Mr. Bush, a director of Harken, sold 212,140 shares for $4 a share, for a total of $848,000. Two months later, on August 20, Harken announced a loss of $23.2 million; on that day its share price dropped 20 percent to $2.375. It closed the year at $1 a share.
There's more to the story. As Wall Street tries to cope with a crisis of confidence involving the fiscal probity of corporations, President Bush has in the past several days recommended that corporations eliminate loans to top executives and corporate insiders. Yet back in the days when he was involved with Harken Energy, the corporation allowed him to borrow heavily from the company's coffers, and then erased his personal liability for that loan. The Bush loan was the exact sort of corporate benefit that helped sink Adelphia and WorldCom, whose CEO, Bernard J. Ebbers, received a $408 million, low-interest loan from the company. But that was then, and this is now . . .
It might seem that things could not get dirtier, yet they can. To add to the chronicle of greed and dishonesty just cited, there is the matter of hypocrisy. The hypocrisy is of signal importance to the developing world, which serves as the major victim of that hypocrisy...."
thestatesman.net |
