Shell of Enron in Houston Is Now About Creditors, Not Oil; Suing 'Enablers,' Selling Units
Here's something you might not know about the collapsed energy titan Enron Corp., amid this week's coverage of the trial: The company still exists.
But even with just 300 employees left at its Houston headquarters -- the company once employed 7,500 there -- some things remain oddly the same. Enron still has an aggressive legal team intent on extracting money from former business partners. Only today, they do it on behalf of creditors who emerged with ownership of the company after it exited from bankruptcy proceedings in November 2004. And it still has a chairman who is paid more than $1 million a year, only now the job is to sell off the remains of the company.
As former top Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling face conspiracy and fraud charges in a Houston federal trial that began this week, the company they once led is still sweeping up the mess from the company's plunge into bankruptcy and scandal more than four years ago. That task involves shedding the company's last remaining assets, most notably Portland General Electric Co., and resolving nearly 1,000 lawsuits, many of them brought by Enron on behalf of its creditor owners who are trying to recover money from former trading partners, banks and even former employees.
All this illustrates how tough it is to actually shutter a big company, even after it has been defamed, delisted and dismembered.
The effort is led by Enron Chairman John Ray III, who is paid $1.2 million a year. He is now left to handle the tasks without the help of Stephen Cooper, who stepped down as chief executive at the beginning of the year, after guiding the company through an unusually complicated bankruptcy proceeding. The plan is for the Enron name to eventually disappear, but that could take years more, given the bramble of lawsuits.
"Enron is a company in liquidation," says Mr. Ray. "There's no going concern."
Take an interactive look at how Enron used an off-balance-sheet entity called Chewco -- after the Star Wars character Chewbacca -- to inflate profits and lower debt.
Vote: Are corporate executives more honest with investors than they were five years ago?In the past year, Enron has distributed more than $1 billion to creditors, and another payment is expected this year. The money has come from lawsuit settlements and asset sales, such as the $2.45 billion sale of CrossCountry Energy, the unit formed in 2003 to hold the Enron pipeline assets that Mr. Lay, the former Enron chairman, once regarded as the crown jewels of the firm. But it still looks as if creditors will receive no more than 20 cents for every dollar of Enron debt they hold, a low yield that equates, roughly, with the creditor recovery in the WorldCom bankruptcy case.
The track record on asset sales has been mixed. Enron sold its vaunted energy-trading operation to UBS Warburg, a unit of UBS AG, in late 2001, but within months, UBS began a series of layoffs that culminated in the shuttering of the Houston operation in mid-2003. After several failed attempts to sell its utility unit, Portland General Electric, Enron decided to spin it off into a separate Oregon corporation this spring and distribute stock to creditors.
The other big asset still owned by Enron is Prisma, Enron's international energy unit, which holds an estimated $1 billion of foreign assets. The board hasn't decided whether to spin Prisma off into a separate company or sell the assets.
Unwinding Enron has been a difficult process because so many assets were tangled in a highly complex web of investments it created to disguise the extent of its indebtedness. Enron attorneys identified 51 primary "special-purpose entities" that functioned as umbrellas for hundreds of smaller vehicles. The biggest have been unwound, but negotiations continue on 15 primary investment vehicles.
Before Enron could even sell off assets, it had to get clear title back. A look at some of the work required to create Prisma illustrates that struggle.
In early 2004, Enron announced it reached a settlement with holders of more than $1 billion of senior secured notes issued by Enron beginning in 1999 for something called the Osprey Trust. As a result of that settlement, Enron acquired full ownership of asset interests held by Osprey, which included a utility in Brazil and power plants in Turkey and Poland.
Those and other assets were, in turn, tied to a flock of smaller investment vehicles bearing the names Whitewing, Blue Heron, Peregrine, Egret, Kingfisher and others.
In order to clean up the convoluted structure, Enron agreed to pay the Osprey note holders $75 million in cash and recognize a $3.6 billion unsecured claim against the Enron estate. Some of the Osprey assets became part of what today is Prisma.
A complication in many cases is the fact that companies often interacted with Enron in different roles, depending on the matter at hand. Big banks, for example, face lawsuits filed by Enron and stand accused of being "enablers" of corrupt schemes by the prior management.
But banks also are major creditors that, in some cases, stand to profit from the very same settlements in which they stand accused.
That isn't uncommon in bankruptcy cases, but it nevertheless explains why unwinding a company such as Enron, which was headed toward annual revenue of $100 billion when it went bust, is a slow process that has kept dozens of attorneys in oats.
Since summer, Enron has settled five of 10 suits against investment banks that loaned the energy company money or helped it create dozens of "SPEs," short for special-purpose entities. Settlements to date of cases in which banks are accused of "aiding and abetting" Enron in unethical schemes have netted about $1.5 billion, but the biggest cases have not settled yet.
Enron's remaining claims against banks, including Credit Suisse Group's Credit Suisse First Boston, Deutsche Bank AG, Barclays PLC, Merrill Lynch & Co. and Citigroup Inc., exceed $10 billion.
“安然”今安在？
对于已经倒闭的能源巨头安然公司(Enron Corp.)，有件事你可能并不了解：这家公司仍然存在。
虽然位于休斯顿的安然总部里只剩下了300名员工──当年这里的雇员有7,500人，不过说来奇怪，有些事却没有丝毫变化：安然还保留著一支干劲十足的律师团队，他们的主要工作就是向从前的业务伙伴催要钱款。
只不过现在他们代表的是公司的债权人──2004年11月，安然公司退出破产程序后，债权人获得了公司的所有权。另外，公司仍然保留了一位年薪超过100万美元的董事长，只不过他现在的工作是卖掉公司的剩余资产。
就在前安然主要高管肯尼斯?莱(Kenneth Lay)和杰弗里?斯基林(Jeffrey Skilling)本周在休斯顿联邦法庭面临共谋和欺诈指控时，他们曾领导的安然仍在收拾四年多以前因陷入破产和丑闻留下的烂摊子。
这些任务包括：处理公司最后的剩余资产，主要是Portland General Electric Co.；解决近1,000宗诉讼，大多是由安然公司代表债权人发起的，这些债权人希望能从安然以前的贸易伙伴、银行甚至是前雇员那里收回一些钱。
所有这一切都表明，真要关闭一家大公司有多困难，即便它已经名声扫地、土崩瓦解，还被赶出了股市。
带领大家收拾烂摊子的是安然现任董事长约翰?雷(John Ray)，他的年薪为120万美元。现在他必须独当一面，因为首席执行长斯蒂芬?库珀(Stephen Cooper)在带领公司完成异常复杂的破产程序后，于今年年初卸任。
雷的任务是让安然的名字彻底消失，但鉴于牵涉大量棘手的诉讼，这个过程恐怕还需要几年时间。
雷说，“安然是一家正在清算的公司，没有什么仍在经营的业务。”
更多信息
? 前安然公司董事长律师批评《华尔街日报》的报导在过去一年里，安然向债权人偿还了10多亿美元，预计今年还将偿还一笔款项。这些钱来自诉讼和解以及出售资产所得，包括以24.5亿美元出售CrossCountry Energy──它是2003年安然为了控制其管线业务而组建的，安然前董事长肯尼斯?莱曾将其视为公司最有价值的一项业务。
不过债权人最后得到的钱似乎不会超出他们实际债权的20%，这个比例与WorldCom破产案中债权人得到的补偿大体相当。
有关资产出售的记录喜忧参半。2001年，安然将其自认赚钱的能源交易业务出售给瑞士银行(UBS AG)旗下的UBS Warburg，不过仅仅几个月后，瑞士银行便开始裁员，2003年年中这家公司便倒闭了。由于几次出售其公用事业公司Portland General Electric未果，安然决定在今年春天将其分拆为独立的公司，并将股票分派给债权人。
安然持有的另一个大型资产是跨国能源企业Prisma，它拥有的外国资产约10亿美元。董事会还没有决定将对Prisma分拆还是出售。
理清安然公司的脉络并非易事，因为它为了掩盖巨额负债，将众多资产与极为复杂的投资网络纠缠在一起。安然公司的律师们确认了51个主要的“特殊目的实体”，它们是用来掩盖上百个小型投资工具的。人们摸清了大型投资工具的底细，但是对另外15个主要投资工具仍需进一步研究。
安然在售出这些资产前，还要重新获得清晰的所有权。来看看组建Prisma需要做些什么，你就可以想像出这个过程有多么困难了。
2004年年初，安然宣布和股东达成了协议，用安然1999年发行的10亿美元优先担保票据换购Osprey Trust。这样安然公司就拥有了Osprey Trust全部的资产权益，其中包括巴西的一家公用事业公司以及土耳其和波兰的发电厂。
而这些和其他一些资产又和许多名为Whitewing，Blue Heron，Peregrine，Egret，Kingfisher等等小型投资工具联系在一起。
为了理顺这个错综复杂的结构，安然同意向Osprey的票据持有者支付7,500万美元现金，这些人还可以拥有总价36亿美元的安然资产无担保债权。Osprey的一些资产成了如今的Prisma的一部分。
许多诉讼的复杂性在于：各公司在不同情况下在安然破产案中扮演著不同角色。比如说，安然指控大银行为公司管理层的腐败阴谋提供了可能性。
但银行也是主要的债权人，有些情况下，银行还会从被控案件的判决中获益。
这种情况在破产案中并不少见，但却解释了为什么处理安然这样的公司──破产时安然的年收入正向1,000亿美元挺进──需要那么长的时间，并且令数十名律师手忙脚乱。
去年夏天以来，在10个针对投资银行──它们曾贷款给安然或帮助它建立了许多“特殊目的实体”──的诉讼中，安然已经解决了其中的5个。到目前为止已判决的诉讼只包括在安然总值15亿美元的不道德交易中被控“协助、教唆”安然的银行，最重大的案件仍旧没有审结。
安然公司还将向多家银行索赔超过100亿美元的款项，其中包括瑞士信贷集团(Credit Suisse Group)旗下的瑞士信贷第一波士顿(Credit Suisse First Boston)、德意志银行(Deutsche Bank AG)、巴克莱(Barclays PLC)、美林公司(Merrill Lynch & Co.)和花旗集团(Citigroup Inc.)。
