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http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,37-2002038428,00.html THURSDAY JANUARY 24 2002 FBI plays public relations game at Enron WALL STREET DIARY BY CHRIS AYRES AS I WRITE, crack teams of stone-faced FBI agents are guarding shredding machines over at Enron's glittering headquarters in Houston. The FBI's timing is impressive: it managed to swoop on Enron's HQ only 92 days and about 11 hours after the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) first began looking for signs of fraud at the now-bankrupt energy trading group. I'm not sure how long it takes to throw a few thousand jumbo-sized folders marked "Enron: possibly incriminating financial data" into the metal teeth of an industrial shredding unit, but I'm confident that it is less than three months. I hope that the FBI's shredder-guards have nothing more urgent to do. The raid on Enron's HQ looks suspiciously like another PR exercise in an investigation that has been all about political histrionics rather than any desire to uncover the truth. No less than ten separate investigations have been launched into Enron's collapse. Meanwhile, President Bush, a man so close to Enron that he may as well have been one of its limited partnership subsidiaries (Dubya III LLC, perhaps) has attempted to turn the firm's collapse into a pensions-reform issue. But no real action has been taken. Enron executives are sitting on the $1.1 billion they raised by selling shares in the company before it collapsed. The court action to freeze their bank accounts, which comes with the weight of New York state's $112 billion (L78 billion) pension fund behind it, has being going nowhere since December 5. The case is unlikely to gather momentum any time soon, because the judge presiding over it mysteriously stood down ealier this month. So, the FBI is guarding shredders that have already done their work; Enron executives STILL have their $1.1 billion; and, more important than all of this, everyone concerned still has their passport and probably knows a good hotel in Monte Carlo. My conspiracy theory is this: nothing is happening because everyone knows Enron probably did nothing illegal. The FBI agents and congressional investigators are going through the motions simply to satisfy the hundreds of thousands of main street voters who lost their shirts, socks and underwear buying Enron stock at $90.56. The fact is, US corporate law allows Fortune 500 companies to hide billions of dollars of debt from investors using all kinds of financial wizardry. Companies can also legally avoid paying unpleasant tax bills on the profits that they have artificially inflated using legal book-keeping tricks. That's why $1 million-per-week accountants exist. As Harvey Pitt, the SEC chairman, has made clear: the US financial system is as pure as the sludge on the bottom of the Hudson River. Enron is just a product of it. Enron and its fee-hungry auditors no doubt broke more than a few rules - which would explain the panicked document shredding. But those who want to see "Kenny Boy" Lay and his chums behind bars may be disappointed. Rudi Giuliani, the hero-worshipped former Mayor of New York, may not share the billionaire status of his successor, Michael Bloomberg, but he will not be shopping at Kmart any time soon. The former mayor, otherwise known as "Rudi the rock", says he hopes to make at least $20 million a year through his new consulting business, imaginatively called Giuliani Partners. Giuliani will offer advice on everything from how to handle a terrorist attack to turning round a city's finances. He says he wants to show corporations "how we took a $40 billion city that was seen as unmanageable and ran it like a business". According to Giuliani, the secret to his success was statistics. "In the Police Department we measured crime statistics every day in 77 precincts of New York city, looking for areas where crime was going up and then assigning resources to bring crime down," he says. Giuliani's crime-fighting philosophy was known as "broken windows" because it rested on the theory that if an area tolerated broken windows it would soon tolerate more serious crime. Perhaps President Bush should put Giuliani in charge of the SEC. One of Giuliani's most defiant gestures as mayor was turning down a $10 million donation to the September 11 fund from Prince Alwaleed, the billionaire Saudi investor. Giuliani tore up the cheque after the prince criticised US foreign policy. But I hear the Saudi prince still carries some clout in New York media circles. For example: a fax from the prince recently landed on the desk of Bill Bolster, head of CNBC International, the business news television channel owned by General Electric. The fax requested kindly that CNBC reposition its satellite so that the prince could receive the channel while on his yacht in the Mediterranean. After some friendly negotiation, Bolster agreed. And so the prince is probably the only man in the world who pays $50,000 per week for a satellite television channel. Finally, more Enron developments. The company's collapse has apparently sparked a mini-crisis in New York's spin-doctoring profession. Enron - once a master of corporate propaganda - has apparently made customers and investors treat corporate "vision and values" statements with a new level of contempt. Now company PRs are finding it difficult to come up with new "V&Vs" without sounding like an August 2000 Enron press release. According to James Kunen, author of How Can You Defend Those People?: "I know one writer who, while struggling to draft one of these corporate credos, threw up her hands in despair and observed: 'Why not just say it? We will strive to make as much money as we can without going to prison'." --------------------------- ANTI-NATO INFORMATION LIST ==^================================================================ This email was sent to: archive@jab.org EASY UNSUBSCRIBE click here: http://topica.com/u/?a84x2u.a9WB2D Or send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] T O P I C A -- Register now to manage your mail! http://www.topica.com/partner/tag02/register ==^================================================================
