Introduction

Enron was an energy trading company founded in 1985 by a guy named Ken Lay. It had a market cap of about 70 billion and at that time, it was the seventh largest publicly traded company in the United States. By December of 2001, a year after its peak stock valuation, Enron had declared chapter 11 bankruptcy because what was revealed was that there were a series of shell companies hiding debts off the books.