INTRODUCTION
Enron was formed during 1985. Enron was a very powerful company that was doing very well in the market. Enron had been a power supplier to utilities. Its business began through the merger of Houston Natural Gas and Omaha-based Inter North. In the following 20 years, Enron grew quickly and became the largest energy trader in the world. By the end of the twenty century, Enron had many honorable titles, such as “one of the world’s leading electricity, natural gas, and communications companies”, “the world most admired corporations”, and so on.
In the following years, with the increase of competition, Enron decided to use diversification and international investment to keep its market position. Actually, these activities brought Enron an unexpected large amount of losses rather than profits. In 1999, after a foray into fiber optics and the broadband market, which was a wrong decision again, Enron suffered too many substantial losses and began bleeding quickly. However, Enron had never declared any information about its losses until October 2001. Instead, in these years, Enron achieved a phenomenal bottom-line through overstating revenues and hiding liabilities.
Besides manipulated the financial statements, Enron never mentioned the risks which it should disclose to its investors. On the contrary, the executives of Enron disclosed a great earnings forecast through the media and encouraged investors to purchase Enron’s stocks. They also suggested their employees invest their pensions in Enron’s stock or stock options. Arthur Andersen, the audit company for Enron, helped Enron hide these frauds for five years. Every time when analysts or Enron’s employees expressed their doubts about Enron’s financial condition, Enron would try to keep them quiet and fired them later. Meanwhile, top executive embezzled. The executives also drove up the