Sherron Watkins was a few weeks into her new position as vice president for corporate development at Enron Corp. in August 2001 when she anonymously flagged the late chairman Kenneth Lay on her concerns.
In a letter sent to Lay a day after former CEO Jeffrey Skilling abruptly resigned, Watkins noted accounting issues and other fraudulent behavior.
“I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals,” Watkins wrote.
Months later, Enron declared bankruptcy. Watkins testified in front of congressional committees, earning recognition that culminated in her being named by Time as one of three Persons of the Year representing whistleblowers in 2002.
Watkins told a crowd gathered at Omaha’s CHI Health Center Thursday that the scandal was partly a result of a lack of people willing to voice their concerns with the company’s business practices.
“Good people just stopped asking questions and never really got their core concerns answered,” she said during the Business Ethics Alliance’s EthicSpace Conference.
Up until the precipitous fall of the Houston-based company, which traced its roots to Omaha, Enron had been considered one of the nation’s most admired companies, with Fortune magazine ranking it as the most innovative company in the country for several years.
It also was valued very highly on the stock market, reaching about $90 per share in mid-2000.
But a little more than a year later, the value of an Enron share had dropped to less than $1 as the...
You are reading the second issue of the Disinformation Monitor. It is published on a monthly basis and provides an overview of developments on the disinformation scenes on NATO’s eastern frontier....