Enron

Enron Corporation was an American energy company headquartered in Houston, Texas. Enron was formed in 1985 by the merger of Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth.

This is a very unusual company. Onone side is a diversified services company, owning power plants, water companies, gas distributors and other business units involved in relatively direct delivery of services to consumers andbusinesses. On the other hand, became notorious applying the Wall Street style to these markets that used to be asleep.

Enron became a huge "market maker" became the leading marketer of energy in the UnitedStates. Growing in these financial issues much more quickly than traditional operations.
In fact the size of its financial operations made Enron became one of the largest energy companies in theworld, with sales that in the previous year exceeded $ 100 billion, competing with names such as Shell and Exxon.
It also entered to compete in the Europe recently released markets, becoming a massivefinancial strength, especially in the UK.

In order to continue growing at this rate, Enron began to borrow money to invest in new projects. However, as this debt had made ​​their gains were lessimpressive, the company began to create partnerships that would allow it to keep debt off their books. One of these associations called Chewco Investments allowed Enron to maintain a debt of $ 600million off their books that were exposed to the government and the people who owned shares. As this debt was not included in the reports of the company, it made Enron seem much more successful than it was.In December 2000, the company claimed to have tripled its profits in two years.

In August 2001, Enron vice president, Sherron Watkins sent an anonymous letter to the director of the company,Kenneth Lay, describing accounting methods that would lead the company to "explode in a series of accounting scandals." In that same month, the director control their employees emails saying he expected...