Enron Case Study

In 1984 Ken Lay became chairman and Chief Operator of Houston Natural Gas. It quickly doubled when it bought Florida Pipeline Company. The next year in 1985 Houston Natural Gas merged Internorth Incorporation. With the merger they both combined to own around 40,000 miles of pipeline and shortly after they changed their name to Enron. Around that time Washington was being lobbied by energy corporations to deregulate business and let companies set their own prices. Energy companies said this would not only lead to the end of monopolies but the extra competition would benefit companies and consumers. Over the next several years Washington began to lift controls on who could produce energy and how it was sold. With an influx of new suppliers energy prices were very unstable. With these deregulations Enron was allowed to sell natural gas on an open market such as oranges and wheat. With this new way of business Enron was able to grow into the seventh largest company in the United States with over 25,000 employees in over thirty countries. It became an innovator in gas trading and technological advances in the energy field. In 1990 Enron hired Jeffery Skilling as the company Energy’s Trading Operation Consultant. At age thirty-six Skilling was able to create the “Gas Bank”. The “Gas Bank “is when a company buys large volumes of gas from producers and resells it to industrial customers at long term contracts. This helped stabilize the gas market which was very volatile at the time. It also helped expand gas production nationwide and helped Enron grow to a major player in the energy industry.

As Skilling went up in rank he started to get the company involved in risky investments to make more profit. In an interview with the University of Virginia he said “We like risk because you make money by taking risk,” This was one of the many reasons which got Enron into financial debt, Skilling also persuaded regulators to allow Enron to use “market-to-market” accounting. A technique used by brokerage companies for securities trading. It allowed Enron to count long-term contracts as immediate profit although most of the money wouldn’t be coming in for several years. For example if a pipeline in Europe was projected to produce $89 million of profit it would be posted, but there was one problem the pipeline hadn’t been built yet.

With the high tech boom Enron moved its gas and electricity online, hoping to cash in on the high stock prices of the dot-coms. Enron sold Wall Street and as a result the stock tripled in value from 1998 to 2000. This was not the only reason it tripled but a definite factor. Within this time Lay and Skilling cashed out around $475 million worth of stock.

Around this time the company was involved in horrible investments. They were buying ridiculous amounts of power plants, pipelines and other ventures which were over priced and not even going to be profitable. With Jay and Skilling wanting to continue this trend of growth “Enron turned itself into a factory for financial deeds that would pump its profit, protect its credit rating and drive up its stock price.” So Enron turned to its Financial Chief Officer Andrew Fastow who set up several partnerships. The very first one to note was called LJM1 which hedged risky stock investments.

Enron set up these partnerships using stock as funding which did not appear on the company’s balance sheet. These partnerships were set up as an SPE or a Special Purpose Entity, which agrees to pay Enron if it investments decline in value. As the investments decline payments were made to Enron and posted as profit. But in reality Enron was paying it self with its own money.

At the end of 1999 LMJ1 gave Enron a paper profit