As we noted Tuesday

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As we noted Tuesday evening, one key question now is who the ‘investors’ were in the debt-concealing outside partnerships overseen by Andrew Fastow.

This and other articles in Wednesday’s Times seem to imply that the partners were all Enron employees. The Post, meanwhile, seems more agnostic on this question.

Yet the authors of the Powers Report (as I try to explain here) seem not to have been able to determine precisely who the investors were. Indeed, the authors of the Report say that they were not able to get access to the “the materials in the possession of the Fastow partnerships or their limited partners.” These papers, I would imagine, are where you find out precisely who the partners were. Finally, the Times profile of Fastow notes the incentives that existed to recruit partners who were either not employees of Enron or employees who were of low enough rank not to need to show up in SEC filings.

By 1999, there were small fissures in Mr. Fastow’s labyrinthine financing empire. As early as 1997, Enron had difficulty finding a partner to buy out Calpers’s interest. So, apparently to skirt disclosure rules, Mr. Fastow proposed listing his wife’s family as outside investors. When he was rebuffed, Michael Kopper, who worked under Mr. Fastow at Enron, was selected. Because he was a lower-level employee, Enron would not have to disclose his interest in S.E.C. filings. Mr. Kopper would eventually make at least $10 million in profit from the venture.

To recap, ‘investors’ in the partnerships reaped immense profits by investing little money and assuming no risk. If people outside the company were getting these sweetheart deals, who were they?

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