Re: \"Unions are Evil\"
[ QUOTE ]
They broke the law in numerous ways. They didn't discover ingenious loopholes, they didn't use ethically grey areas to give them an advantage over their competitors and they didn't ignorantly break some obscure laws that had hardly any effect on how thay ran their business. They committed fraud, they co-erced and bullied their workforce and other investors not in the know to keep their value artificially high by giving false information about the state of the company, they manipulated certain energy markets to give an impression that a commodity that was in fact in abundance was scarce and more valuble than it was.
[/ QUOTE ]
But this was "common" knowledge as far back as 1998. I recall talking with a group at Deloitte who were well aware of what Andersen was doing. They were pretty open about it, wondered why Andersen would do it, and flatly told me that if I wanted those types of services I would have to go to Andersen. The information was in the financials, people simply didn't want to believe it. The government manipulation of "accounting" and tax law added a lot of "grey area" -- add to that a period when so many unsophisticated investors were in the market, and you get Enron.
|