I Prìncipi dello Yen (Documentario su creazione delle bolle economiche) (Potrebbe 2024)
Scandalo Enron, serie di eventi che hanno provocato il fallimento della società americana di energia, materie prime e servizi Enron Corporation e lo scioglimento di Arthur Andersen LLP, che era stata una delle più grandi società di revisione contabile e contabilità del mondo. Il crollo di Enron, che ha detenuto oltre 60 miliardi di dollari in attività, ha coinvolto una delle più grandi dichiarazioni di fallimento nella storia degli Stati Uniti e ha generato molti dibattiti e una legislazione progettata per migliorare gli standard e le pratiche contabili, con una lunga durata ripercussioni nel mondo finanziario.
Enron è stata fondata nel 1985 da Kenneth Lay nella fusione di due società di trasmissione di gas naturale, Houston Natural Gas Corporation e InterNorth, Inc.; la società fusa, HNG InterNorth, fu ribattezzata Enron nel 1986. Dopo che il Congresso degli Stati Uniti adottò una serie di leggi per liberalizzare la vendita di gas naturale nei primi anni '90, la società perse il suo diritto esclusivo di gestire i suoi gasdotti. Con l'aiuto di Jeffrey Skilling, che inizialmente era un consulente e in seguito divenne il direttore operativo della società, Enron si trasformò in un commerciante di contratti derivati sull'energia, fungendo da intermediario tra i produttori di gas naturale e i loro clienti. Le negoziazioni hanno permesso ai produttori di mitigare il rischio di fluttuazioni dei prezzi dell'energia fissando il prezzo di vendita dei loro prodotti attraverso un contratto negoziato da Enron a pagamento.Sotto la guida di Skilling, Enron ha presto dominato il mercato dei contratti di gas naturale e la società ha iniziato a generare enormi profitti sui suoi scambi.
L'abilità ha anche cambiato gradualmente la cultura dell'azienda per enfatizzare il commercio aggressivo. Ha assunto i migliori candidati dai programmi MBA in tutto il paese e ha creato un ambiente altamente competitivo all'interno dell'azienda, in cui l'attenzione si è concentrata sempre più sulla chiusura del maggior numero possibile di operazioni generatrici di liquidità nel minor tempo possibile. Una delle sue reclute più brillanti fu Andrew Fastow, che rapidamente salì in classifica per diventare il principale responsabile finanziario di Enron. Fastow ha supervisionato il finanziamento dell'azienda attraverso investimenti in strumenti sempre più complessi, mentre Skilling ha supervisionato la costruzione della sua vasta operazione commerciale.
The bull market of the 1990s helped to fuel Enron’s ambitions and contributed to its rapid growth. There were deals to be made everywhere, and the company was ready to create a market for anything that anyone was willing to trade. It thus traded derivative contracts for a wide variety of commodities—including electricity, coal, paper, and steel—and even for the weather. An online trading division, Enron Online, was launched during the dot-com boom, and the company invested in building a broadband telecommunications network to facilitate high-speed trading.
As the boom years came to an end and as Enron faced increased competition in the energy-trading business, the company’s profits shrank rapidly. Under pressure from shareholders, company executives began to rely on dubious accounting practices, including a technique known as “mark-to-market accounting,” to hide the troubles. Mark-to-market accounting allowed the company to write unrealized future gains from some trading contracts into current income statements, thus giving the illusion of higher current profits. Furthermore, the troubled operations of the company were transferred to so-called special purpose entities (SPEs), which are essentially limited partnerships created with outside parties. Although many companies distributed assets to SPEs, Enron abused the practice by using SPEs as dump sites for its troubled assets. Transferring those assets to SPEs meant that they were kept off Enron’s books, making its losses look less severe than they really were. Ironically, some of those SPEs were run by Fastow himself. Throughout these years, Arthur Andersen served not only as Enron’s auditor but also as a consultant for the company.
The severity of the situation began to become apparent in mid-2001 as a number of analysts began to dig into the details of Enron’s publicly released financial statements. An internal investigation was initiated following a memorandum from a company vice president, and soon the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) was investigating the transactions between Enron and Fastow’s SPEs.
As the details of the accounting frauds emerged, the stock price of the company plummeted from a high of $90 per share in mid-2000 to less than $1 by the end of November 2001, taking with it the value of Enron employees’ 401(k) pensions, which were mainly tied to the company stock. Lay and Skilling resigned, and Fastow was fired two days after the SEC investigation started.
On December 2, 2001, Enron filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Many Enron executives were indicted on a variety of charges and were later sentenced to prison. Arthur Andersen came under intense scrutiny and eventually lost a majority of its clients. The damage to its reputation was so severe that it was forced to dissolve itself. In addition to federal lawsuits, hundreds of civil suits were filed by shareholders against both Enron and Andersen.
The scandal resulted in a wave of new regulations and legislation designed to increase the accuracy of financial reporting for publicly traded companies. The most important of those measures, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (2002), imposed harsh penalties for destroying, altering, or fabricating financial records. The act also prohibited auditing firms from doing any concurrent consulting business for the same clients.
