However, the traders were fired once it was revealed that Enron's reserves were gambled away which nearly destroyed the company. After these facts were brought to light, Ken Lay denies having any knowledge of wrongdoing. Needless to say, when required to testify before the U.S. Congress on the reasons for Enron’s collapse, Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling and Andrew Fastow, sought refuge under the Fifth Amendment. Andrew Fastow, Jeffrey Skilling, and Kenneth Lay are among the most notable top-level executives implicated in the collapse of Enron’s. Kenneth Lay, the former chairman of Enron was prosecuted on 11 criminal counts of making misleading statements and fraud.
With a pay package that included more than seven million shares and options, Dunlap stood to make more than $200 million personally if he could keep Sunbeam's stock price flying. In the spring of 1998, when Dunlap and his team ran out of tricks, Sunbeam corrected its books, declared bankruptcy, and the stock price plunged from $53 at its peak to just pennies today. In an ominous harbinger of the Enron scandal, the SEC discovered that Andersen accounting documents had been destroyed. In the case of Waste Management -- which in 1998 issued the largest corporate restatement before Enron -- the company had exaggerated its earnings by $1.7 billion. The SEC's investigation found a long-running cover-up -- not just by Waste Management, but by Andersen as well.
At the time of his plea, prosecutors said Grass admitted to a series of illegal activities, from backdating contracts and severance letters to misleading the company and federal investigators about a $2.6 million real estate deal. They said he also met with employees called to testify before the grand jury and encouraged them to lie. During Grass' time at the head of the Camp Hill-based company founded by his father, Alex Grass, its stock price soared as Rite Aid engaged in an aggressive expansion effort. But the grand jury said the boom years were accomplished by "massive accounting fraud, the deliberate falsification of financial statements, and intentionally false SEC filings." Less than a year after
Adelphia Communications – Corporate Scandal Adelphia Communications – Nature of the business Adelphia Communications is a cable television company that had its headquarters in Greenwood Village, Colorado. It was the fifth largest telecommunications company in the US with annual revenue of $3.61 billion. Founded by John Rigas in 1952, it made rapid strides before accounting scandals ripped the company apart. It was eventually sold to Time Warner Cable, Comcast and Pioneer Telephone in July 2006. Downfall of the company In 2002, Adelphia disclosed that it had $2.3 billion in off balance sheet loans and this money was used by the Rigas family for their expenses.
These scandals cost investors billions of dollars when the share prices of affected companies collapsed, and shook the publics’ faith in the security markets. When examining the SOX act you can see that since 2002 many things have changed in the past eight years. Corporate governance is one of many things that have changed; Public companies must now have a totally separate audit committee composed of entirely independent directors and must contain one financial expert. Security fraud now has much more extreme punishments for those who commit or conspire to commit fraud. Since the introduction of SOX auditors of public companies must keep documentation of an audit for seven years, destruction of any documentation or evidence that someone has committed fraud is now punishable by jail time and fine.
During an investigation there were many questionable accounting transactions that were brought up, such as large executive bonuses as well as many loans for large amounts of money that were later forgiven without repayment. Kozlowski and Swartz were sentenced to 8 – 25 years in prison ("Investopedia", 2014). Then a lawsuit against Tyco cost the company $2.92 billion in repayment to its investors ("Investopedia", 2014). The biggest issue here was allowing for a CEO and CFO to have too much access to funds. A protocol should be in place that when a sale of stocks is made and no one authorized it then a full audit should take place from a third party or if a loan is going to be made then more then just the CEO and CFO’s approval needs to be given.
The company took risky dealings but continued to make billions of dollars every year. The most disturbing part is that the CEO had openly admitted his suspicions of the AIG Financial Products unit. Right before the company collapsed, AIG had accessed over $60 billion in probable subprime mortgage losses. In 2008, AIG’s problems caught up with them. The bailout was a kind of derivative call credit default swaps which are financial products that transfer the risk of the bonds between the parties.
CASE 1.6 NEXTCARD, INC. Synopsis In November 2001, Arthur Andersen & Co. employees in that firm’s Houston office shredded certain Enron audit workpapers during the midst of a federal investigation of the large energy company. The decision to destroy those workpapers ultimately proved to be the undoing of the prominent accounting firm. A few years later, a felony conviction for obstruction of justice would effectively put Andersen out of business. Ironically, at the same time that the Andersen personnel were shredding Enron workpapers, three senior members of the NextCard, Inc., audit engagement team were altering the fiscal 2000 audit workpapers of that San Francisco-based company. NextCard was founded during the late 1990s by Jeremy Lent, the former chief financial officer of the large financial services company, Providian Financial Corporation.
The Collapse of Enron Barbara Bonnema Post University The Collapse of Enron What led to the eventual collapse of Enron under Lay and Skilling? How did the top leadership at Enron undermine the foundation values of the Enron Code of Ethics? How did Enron’s corporate culture promote unethical decisions and actions? These questions are answered and explained with examples as follows: 1)There are several reasons that eventually led to Enron’s collapse: a) A corrupt leadership at the top. Numerous Enron executives were charged with criminal acts, including fraud, money laundering and insider trading.
ACRC: CORPRORATE GOVERNANCE FAILURE AT SATYAM 1. What are the reasons for the inadequate corporate governance at Satyam? The fall of Satyam can be attributed to many causes as mentioned below: * Raju had been manipulating Satyam’s financial books for a period of seven years and the major corporate governance issue was that the Board of Directors and the auditors were unable to catch hold of the issue for so long. * Raju and his family founded a group of companies called Maytas. It was owned by his sons and to ensure billion dollar targets for Maytas, Raju inflated cash and bank balances in Satyam’s financial records.