In 1999, fast-o starts a campaign within Enron with lay and skilling to get himself nominated for the CFO of the year. He ends up not winning, but he does get a special award from CFO magazine in the category of capital structure management. It's difficult to find just skilling signature on anything, even though the whole agreement was skilling will sign off as the final approver on deals. The documents that surface have a variety of signatures on them, but not skillings.
The FTX fraud has dominated headlines now for weeks, during which we’ve debated if and how Acquired could uniquely add to the conversation. Then we realized there was an angle so perfect that we had to drop everything and enter Acquired research overdrive: Enron. Travel back with us to the granddaddy fraud of them all, 2001’s then-largest bankruptcy in US history and the impetus for the famous Sarbanes-Oxley Act. So much of Enron’s history parallels FTX that the uncanniness is almost unbelievable — right down to the same CEO running the two bankruptcies. Sit back and enjoy this crazy tale of villainy, greed, and the nature of humans and money. Maybe just don’t take notes on this one…
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