The Enron scandal, revealed in October 2001, involved the energy company Enron and the accounting, auditing, and consultancy partnershipof Arthur Andersen. The corporate scandal eventually led to Enron's downfall, resulting in the largest bankruptcy in American history at the time. Arthur Andersen, which was one of the five largest accounting firms in the world, was dissolved.
Enron was formed in 1985 by Kenneth Lay after merging Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth. Several years later, when Jeffrey Skilling was hired, he developed a staff of executives that, through the use of accounting loopholes, special purpose entities, and poor financial reporting, were able to hide billions in debt from failed deals and projects. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and other executives were able to mislead Enron's board of directors and audit committee of high-risk accounting issues as well as pressure Andersen to ignore the issues.
Enron's nontransparent financial statements did not clearly detail its operations and finances with shareholders and analysts. In addition, its complex business model stretched the limits of accounting, requiring that the company use accounting limitations to manage earnings and modify the balance sheet to portray a favorable depiction of its performance. According to McLean and Elkid in their book The Smartest Guys in the Room, "The Enron scandal grew out of a steady accumulation of habits and values and actions that began years before and finally spiraled out of control." From late 1997 until its collapse, the primary motivations for Enron’s accounting and financial transactions seem to have been to keep reported income and reported cash flow up, asset values inflated, and liabilities off the books.
The combination of these issues later led to the bankruptcy of the company, and the majority of them were perpetuated by the indirect knowledge or direct actions of Lay, Jeffrey Skilling,Andrew Fastow, and other executives. Lay served as the chairman of the company in its last few years, and approved of the actions of Skilling and Fastow although he did not always inquire about the details. Skilling, constantly focused on meeting Wall Street expectations, pushed for the use of mark-to-market accounting and pressured Enron executives to find new ways to hide its debt. Fastow and other executives, "...created off-balance-sheet vehicles, complex financing structures, and deals so bewildering that few people can understand them even now."
This is what happened to Parmalat. It was in 1997 that Parmalat jumped into the world financial markets in a big way, financing several international acquisitions, especially in the Western Hemisphere, with debt. But by 2001, many of the new divisions were producing losses, and the company financing shifted largely to the use of derivatives, apparently at least in part with the intention of hiding the extent of its losses and debt.
In February 2003, chief financial officer Fausto Tonna unexpectedly announced a new €500 million bond issue. This came as a surprise both to the markets and to the CEO, Tanzi. Tanzi fired Tonna and replaced him as CFO with Alberto Ferraris.
According to an interview he later gave Time magazine, Ferraris was surprised to discover that, though now CFO, he still didn't have access to some of the corporate books, which were being handled by chief accounting officer Luciano Del Soldato. He began making some inquiries and began to suspect that the company's total debt was more than double that on the balance sheet.
The crisis became public in November when questions were raised about transactions with mutual fund Epicurum, another Cayman-based company linked to Parmalat causing its stock to plummet. Ferraris resigned less than a week later and was replaced by Del Soldato.
In December, Del Soldato resigned, unable to get cash from Epicurum fund, needed to pay debts and make bond payments. Enrico Bondi was called in to help the company. Tanzi himself resigned as chairman and CEO. Parmalat's bank, Bank of America, then released a document showing €3.95 billion in Bonlat's bank account as a forgery. Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi initiated a fraud investigation and appointed Bondi to administer the company's rescue. Hundreds of thousands of investors lost their money and will never recover it. The company officially went bankrupt, though the Italian government used the legal mean "commissariamento" to save the trademark.
The story of Worldcom: CEO Bernard Ebbers became very wealthy from the rising price of his holdings in WorldCom common stock. However, in the year 2000, the telecommunications industry entered a downturn and WorldCom’s aggressive growth strategy suffered a serious setback when it was forced by the US Justice Department to abandon its proposed merger with Sprint in mid 2000. By that time, WorldCom’s stock was declining and Ebbers came under increasing pressure from banks to cover margin calls on his WorldCom stock that was used to finance his other businesses (timber and yachting, among others). During 2001, Ebbers persuaded WorldCom’s board of directors to provide him corporate loans and guarantees in excess of $400 million to cover his margin calls. The board hoped that the loans would avert the need for Ebbers to sell substantial amounts of his WorldCom stock, as his doing so would put further downward pressure in the stock's price. However, this strategy ultimately failed and Ebbers was ousted as CEO in April 2002 and replaced by John Sidgmore, former CEO of UUNet Technologies, Inc.
Beginning modestly in mid-year 1999 and continuing at an accelerated pace through May 2002, the company (under the direction of Ebbers, Scott Sullivan (CFO), David Myers (Controller) and Buford "Buddy" Yates (Director of General Accounting)) used fraudulent accounting methods to mask its declining earnings by painting a false picture of financial growth and profitability to prop up the price of WorldCom’s stock.
The fraud was accomplished primarily in two ways:
A. Underreporting ‘line costs’ (interconnection expenses with other telecommunication companies) by capitalizing these costs on the balance sheet rather than properly expensing them.
B.Inflating revenues with bogus accounting entries from "corporate unallocated revenue accounts".
In 2002 a small team of internal auditors at WorldCom worked together, often at night and in secret, to investigate and unearth $3.8 billion in fraud. Shortly thereafter, the company’s audit committee and board of directors were notified of the fraud and acted swiftly: Sullivan was fired, Myers resigned, Arthur Andersen withdrew its audit opinion for 2001, and the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) launched an investigation into these matters on June 26, 2002 . By the end of 2003, it was estimated that the company's total assets had been inflated by around $11 billion.
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