Monday, September 18, 2006

What The Juror Saw

This brief Inc. magazine interview of Wendy Vaughan, an entrepreneur who served on the Enron jury, is one of the best articles I’ve seen on the case:

We learned a lot about Lay from videos of employee meetings that we were shown. At some points in the trial, we were so video'd out from hours and hours of those videos! But they showed him to be very dynamic, to be a very concerned individual. And the employees would ask him tough questions in those meetings, and he was welcoming of that scenario. I don't think you can develop that kind of relationship with employees and not be involved in the day-to-day activities in the office. You can't have it both ways.

Another thing that bothered me happened after the whistleblower Sherron Watkins was sounding the alarm, and some other people were sending letters to supervisors with concerns. Lay finally made the decision to supposedly investigate these concerns--I'll put investigate in quotation marks--and he had the same accountants who were responsible for the screwups go back and investigate themselves. That does not make any sense to me at all. Why wouldn't you bring in somebody who's never been in there? And Watkins even brought that up to Lay in a letter she wrote to him--that he shouldn't use the same accountants.

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