If you’re looking to see where the Enron story might get explosive, this might be the place to look.
Consider the following: the Powers Report describes how Enron’s outside partnerships (controlled by Enron CFO Andrew Fastow) allowed Fastow and others to make millions of dollars for transactions which had no other purpose than to obscure Enron’s true financial health and make money for “Fastow and others.”
Who were the “others”?
The partnerships were paper companies which made large sums of money for transactions which involved no risk. They were, in other words, perfect vehicles for sweetheart deals political or otherwise, for helping friends ‘make’ tons of money. Fastow was key to each of the partnerships. The report discusses other Enron employees who were “partners.” So, again, who were the other partners?
Footnote 65, on page 149 of the report, says …
We have not seen any evidence that any member of the Board of Directors had a financial interest in any of the partnerships that are discussed here.
Let’s unpack what this means.
According to the report, the board’s investigators had “no access to the materials in the possession of the Fastow partnerships or their limited partners.” This and the quote above imply that the investigators didn’t have access to records detailing who all the partners in the partnerships were. Otherwise, why use the phrasing “have not see any evidence that…”? If you have the list in front of you, there’s no need to say you haven’t seen any evidence, etc. You either know or you don’t, period. (One also assumes, since this was the board’s committee, that the board members cooperated with the investigation and said they weren’t partners.)
So we know there were multiple partners in the partnerships. Some are named Enron employees. None of them, according to the report, were members of the Enron board. But the investigators assumed that there were, or at least could be, other unnamed partner/profiteers out there.
Again, who are they?
