Enron-Insider verkauften vor der Pleite Aktien für 1,1 Mrd. Dollar
[13.01.2002 - 09:40]
Im Schatten der neuesten Nachrichten aus Amerika zur Enron (851914)-Pleite verblassen Meldungen wie, Argentinien sei beleidigt wegen der IWF-Empfehlungen oder, dass wir Deutsche mit dem Euro gut klarkommen.
Während nämlich Aktionäre und Pensionskassen, die in Enron investiert sind, ihre Wunden lecken und nachrechnen, wieviel Geld sie durch den Bankrott verloren haben, fangen andere mit Nachforschungen an, wer von den Enron-Insidern zu einer Zeit als der Kurs noch hoch war, große Kasse gemacht hat.
Eine Gruppe von 29 Enron-Direktoren und -Managern begann ihre Aktien, die großteils aus Stockoptionen stammten, abzustossen, als der Kurs der Enron-Aktie noch von einem Hoch zum nächsten kletterte. Diese Insider erlösten in der Zeit von 1999 bis Mitte 2001 beim Verkauf von 17,3 Mio Aktien 1,1 Mrd. Dollar.
Einer der am meisten verkaufte, war nach einem Bericht der New York Times Kenneth L. Lay, der Boss von Enron und Gönner eines gewissen G.W. Bush. Lay verkaufte insgesamt 350 mal Aktien und nahm dabei 101,3 Mio Dollar ein. Er veräußerte 1,8 Mio Aktien zwischen 1999 und Juli 2001, fünf Monate bevor Enron bankrott ging. Der Preis für seine Aktien bewegte sich von 31 Dollar bis 86 Dollar. Letzte Woche tauchte er nicht als Verkäufer auf: da kostete eine Enron-Aktie unter 70 Cents. Die meisten seiner Aktien stammten aus Stock-Options, die es Managern von Firmen ermöglichen, Aktien zu Discountpreisen zu kaufen.
Damit der Kurs nicht nach unten kracht, bevor der Boss seine Aktiendeals abgeschlossen hat, schickte er noch zwei Monate vor dem Ende euphorische E-Mails an seine Mitarbeiter:
"Unsere Performance war niemals größer, unser Geschäftsmodell war niemals widerstandsfähiger .... wir haben die tollste Organisation in der amerikanischen Wirtschaft von heute."
Der Sprecher von Enron, Mark Palmer, beharrt darauf, dass der Enron-Chef die Wahrheit sprach. Enron hatte zu diesem Zeitpunkt das 21. Quartal ununterbrochenen Gewinnwachstums hinter sich. Das Kerngeschäft von Enron sei nie besser dagestanden als im August 2001.
Doch am 16. Oktober stellte die Unternehmensleitung für das 3. Quartal plötzlich Verluste von mehreren hundert Millionen Dollar fest und Abschreibungsverluste in Milliardenhöhe. Wie sich diese roten Zahlen im Rücken des Enron-Chefs und seiner Spitzenmannschaft auftürmen konnten, ohne dass sie es merkten, scheint vorerst das großte Rätsel der amerikanischen Wirtschaftsgeschichte zu sein.
Quelle: www.boersenreport.de/...46&berkey=19786&content=Internet-Media
noch einer: ( zum übersetzen reicht mein Englisch leider nicht)
Quelle: www.latimes.com/business/...umn?coll=la%2Dheadlines%2Dbusiness
Market Beat
Enron and Ivan Boesky: Symbols of Their Eras
With every financial market boom, then bust, one person or company often emerges as the symbol of all that went terribly wrong.
In the late 1980s and early '90s that symbol was Ivan Boesky, the stock trader who agreed to pay $100 million to settle insider-trading charges, and then helped implicate junk bond king Michael Milken and others in a far wider federal investigation of dirty dealings on Wall Street.
Today, there is a long list candidates from which to select the enduring symbol of the late 1990s economic and market boom and the bust that has followed. But they are mostly general themes rather than individual names: dot-com companies in aggregate, for example; manipulated initial public share offerings; brokerage analysts who never met a stock they didn't like; accounting firms that never met a "pro forma" earnings statement they couldn't certify. By last week, however, one individual name was rapidly moving up the candidate list: Enron Corp.
The former energy-trading giant, which on Dec. 2 became the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, may for future generations summarize in two syllables all of the excesses that marked the late-'90s boom and helped precipitate the subsequent bust.
Consider: Enron, like dot-com companies, was a "new paradigm" business that argued (successfully, for a while) that its stock deserved a premium valuation because there wasn't much brick and mortar to support it, but rather intellectual assets, financial savvy and the seeming certainty that the firm's vision of the energy business' future was the correct vision.
Enron also had virtually every analyst on Wall Street in its breast pocket, in part because of a take-no-prisoners approach to those who challenged it. During one investor conference call last spring, a money manager who dared to ask then-Enron Chief Executive Jeffrey Skilling for an updated company balance sheet was called an obscenity by Skilling.
As analysts and investors found out much too late, Enron had plenty to hide: By October, the company began to reveal the extent of losses it had racked up doing business with largely hidden partnerships run by Enron executives. The company's financial statements were rewritten back to 1997, sharply reducing the earnings investors had believed were real.
As the company careened toward bankruptcy, and a once $90 stock became worth pennies, a key question was, "Where were the auditors?" Why didn't the company's independent accountants raise issues with Enron's inflated financial results?
Last week the auditing firm, Andersen, detonated a bomb of its own, announcing that its employees had destroyed a "significant" number of documents related to Enron audits.
By Friday, it still wasn't clear whether the documents had been destroyed intentionally or by accident. But the outcome may be the same either way: the demise of Andersen itself, the fifth-largest U.S. accounting firm.
Thus, the similarities between the Ivan Boesky saga and the Enron story continue to grow. Both reeked of astounding hubris, self-dealing and greed.
Boesky, it was argued, ripped off small investors by trading takeover stocks with inside knowledge, and by manipulating securities prices to suit his desires. The same was said of Milken and his brokerage, Drexel Burnham Lambert. Boesky's testimony was key to the eventual imprisonment of Milken and the bankruptcy of Drexel.
But it was impossible to measure exactly how much small investors were harmed by the self-dealing of Boesky and Milken. In some cases, investors who bet on the same takeover stocks that Boesky played may have profited, thanks to him. (Some defenders of Boesky at the time argued that his crimes were essentially victimless, and that he was a piker among Wall Street crooks.)
As for Milken, whose enormous power to manipulate the corporate junk bond market clearly had corrupted him, his downfall helped at least temporarily to crush the value of many junk bonds in 1990, ruining some investors' fortunes.
But Milken's underwriting skills also helped to build up many legitimate companies in the 1980s (among them: phone giant MCI, now part of WorldCom, and Ted Turner's Turner Broadcasting, now part of AOL Time Warner), creating thousands of jobs that didn't disappear when he went off to prison. And the junk bond market quickly recovered in the early 1990s, and today is larger than ever and a critical source of financing for many companies.
Enron's collapse, by contrast, took with it the retirement savings of thousands of employees, and punched serious, and likely irreparable, holes in the portfolios of many institutional and individual investors. Many analysts believe it is highly unlikely that Enron's common shareholders will collect a cent in the bankruptcy.
(The stock didn't trade Friday, and the New York Stock Exchange said it will continue to suspend trading pending more details on Enron's future. The shares closed at 67 cents on Thursday.)
Whether Enron's business concept as an energy trader will prove to be a lasting legacy for its industry remains to be seen.
For now, the company's name is certain only to remind future generations of the biggest scandals of the last bull market: investors' blind faith in the promises of arrogant corporate managers; Wall Street analysts' (and, perhaps, the financial media's) inability or unwillingness to question conventional wisdom; and independent auditors' failures in the process of discovery and disclosure of companies' true financial positions.
Tom Petruno can be reached at tom.petruno@latimes.com. For recent columns on the Web, go to: www.latimes.com/petruno.
und noch was!
January 13, 2002
Quelle: www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/business/...5f4819e6e561e4e&ei=5038
Treasury Official's Ties Led to Calls About Problems Involving Enron
By RICHARD W. STEVENSON
WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — As a Democrat, Peter R. Fisher, the undersecretary of the Treasury for domestic finance, is a rarity in the Bush administration. But in an administration that is noticeably light on connections to and expertise in the financial markets, he is perhaps even more notable for having extensive and long-standing ties to Wall Street and the banking system.
It was Mr. Fisher's ability to gather facts, analysis and rumor from within the financial system, drawn from his years of experience in a similar position at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, that led Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill to ask him last fall to check on how big a problem it would be if the Enron Corporation (news/quote) were to go bankrupt.
It was his role as the administration's liaison to the markets that led Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary who is now chairman of the executive committee at Citigroup (news/quote), one of Enron's two main lenders, to call him about the situation.
It also made Mr. Fisher a natural point of contact for Enron itself. Whether simply to keep the government informed of financial problems at the dominant player in the burgeoning business of trading energy, as Enron says it was doing, or seeking assistance as it fought to survive, as the administration has suggested twice in recent days was the case, Mr. Fisher was clearly the go-to guy.
Mr. Fisher's job entails several duties, including managing the government's debt and overseeing regulation of the banking industry. During the weeks in late October and early November when he was called six to eight times by Greg Whalley, Enron's president, Mr. Fisher was enacting a plan to suspend issuance of the 30-year Treasury bond, perhaps the best-known security in the financial markets and long the benchmark for investment safety.
But as much as anything, Mr. Fisher, who declined a request for an interview, is an intelligence gatherer who can pick up the phone and talk to just about any Wall Street or banking executive.
Mr. Fisher's role in dealing with Enron started when Kenneth L. Lay, the energy company's chairman, called Mr. O'Neill on Oct. 28. Mr. Lay, administration officials said, drew an analogy between Enron's deteriorating financial condition and the crisis set off in 1998 by the fall of Long Term Capital Management, a giant hedge fund. Because Long Term Capital owed money to so many banks and investment firms, regulators were concerned that its collapse could set off a chain reaction that could endanger the entire financial system.
Enron had similar entanglements throughout Wall Street. But it was far from clear that its problems were a threat to anyone else, or the financial system as a whole. In turning to Mr. Fisher for an opinion, Mr. O'Neill was able to draw on someone who was almost uniquely qualified to render a judgment.
As an executive vice president of the New York Fed, Mr. Fisher had played a critical role in dealing with Long Term Capital's troubles.
When asked to look into Enron's situation by Mr. O'Neill, Mr. Fisher was able to call on people he had been calling for years. They included his successor at the New York Fed, Dino Kos. He was also able to canvass executives at most of the major investment firms. Mr. Fisher's verdict was that Enron did not present the same type of threat to the financial system that Long Term Capital had.
Michele Davis, the spokeswoman for the Treasury department, said the information passed to Mr. O'Neill and Mr. Fisher was of the same sort that was appearing in the newspapers about Enron during that period.
@bunny, vieleicht ist ja was dabei!
Gr. Luki2 :-)