> mostly wasn't fraud, it was truly innovative accounting that with hindsight was the wrong idea
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.
This is the point of the original comment, you have failed to engage in the actual material and have instead just concluded a binary position of "bad".
Read the book. I came in thinking "Enron bad" at the beginning, but left the opinion I stated above, that they did clearly commit fraud, but that it wasn't just a bunch of bad people deciding to do fraud one day, that it was a slow transformation from things that were obviously legal, to things that were obviously illegal, where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
Mark to market accounting for energy businesses doesn't work (in this way at least). We know that now because Enron tried it, legally, and it didn't work, somewhat spectacularly.
> where it's actually surprisingly hard to draw a line separating the two.
It's really not that hard. If they sincerely thought they were doing something legal they would have sat back and waited to be vindicated, not spun up the The Power-Shredder 2400™ in a panic and started feeding it what, for the sake of argument, a court of law might want to call "evidence".
Again, you're failing to engage with the comments here in exactly the way that the comments were complaining about. Your insights are factually incorrect and your comments say more about you than they do about Enron.
The Enron scandal took place over nearly a 10 year period. The company was weird but likely not illegal for probably half that, most of even senior leadership appeared to be in the dark about the actual fraud (willingly or otherwise) until probably a few years left. They only started shredding evidence with weeks left. This is a 20k person company, no matter how you slice it that many people aren't committing a large conspiracy together and to suggest otherwise is ludicrous.
When your "innovative accounting" makes you feel, at some point, that you should be shredding important documents, I think it mostly was actual fraud. You know, criminal behavior.
Let's call it like it is: a bunch of rich, extremely entitled people who decided they should, you know, be more rich by abusing their privilage and positions, and who helped nobody except themselves.
There's nothing admirable there, just another of those lessons that we ignore continually: cockroaches wear suits, and often expensive ones too.