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Friday, Nov 27, 2009
Facing down cameras and a hostile Senate committee, the ex-Enron chief was the picture of aloofness, right down to his monogrammed cuffs.
Feb 13, 2002 | Before embattled ex-Enron CEO Ken Lay entered the Senate Commerce Committee's Tuesday morning hearing on the collapse of what was once the nation's seventh-largest company, he was permitted to hang out in the committee's staff rooms, away from the glare of the media.
Senators passed him as they walked from the anteroom, into the hearing chamber. But Lay didn't follow their lead. When it was time for him to make his entrance into the small hearing room, he didn't take the direct route and hop from the anteroom into the hearing room. With a coterie of attorneys, a P.R. flack, a bodyguard and his scowling 31-year-old attorney daughter Liz, Lay exited from the staff room back into the hall, and then, once he was finished, back through the hall into the hearing room -- the long, dramatic way.
It was only the latest bit of staging in the political Kabuki of the congressional Enron hearings. After all, the committee had been informed that Lay didn't intend to answer any of its questions, but was going to invoke his Fifth Amendment right to refuse to testify against himself. Though he did so with maximum worminess; his statement in which he invoked his right against self-incrimination also had him pleading innocent and insisting that he wanted to spill his guts and prove his innocence but his attorney, Earl Silbert, had all but held a gun to his head and forced him not to do so.
Some of the myriad Enron-related congressional hearings have been enlightening. Last week's House Energy and Commerce oversight subcommittee hearing shed light on what Enron attorney Jordan Mintz called the "dysfunctionality" of the company, and president and COO Jeffrey Skilling's off-putting combination of arrogance and delusion helped explain how a Fortune 10 company could be so mismanaged.
Other hearings have explored the various legislative remedies that might have prevented the company's implosion -- a separation of accountants who consult and those who audit, more corporate transparency -- or at least offered greater worker protection. Other hearings have been more about political theater. (Time stood still during last week's House Financial Services subcommittee hearing, for instance, when the Democrats and Republicans sparred on whether witnesses should be sworn in and therefore subject to even harsher perjury penalties -- not to mention the more serious imagery on the evening news.)
Perhaps some find, in the scolding diatribes various members of Congress inflict upon executives from Enron and Arthur Andersen LLP, a way for the public to vicariously vent. But being that many of these same congressmen and senators ripped open regulatory loopholes through which Enron's avaricious drove their getaway car, it's not difficult to sneer at some of the expressed pieties. Committee member Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas -- the No. 1 Senate recipient of Enron largesse, with $101,500, and the No. 8 recipient of Andersen cash, with $25,750 -- chose the moment of her opening statement at Tuesday's hearing to tout her pension reform bill.
Clueless questions and mispronounced names -- a House affliction more than a Senate one -- never bolster the seriousness of the proceedings, either. Nor does endless self-important windbagging, like that from Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Tuesday morning, complete with charts held up by some poor staffer who was made to stand next to her during her opening statement as if she were a human easel. Like every Western senator, Boxer was trying to make the point that last year's Left Coast energy crisis was Enron's fault, though all she really proved today is that Skilling -- already a House-certified asshole -- once made an insensitive joke about the crisis.
The proceedings began with every senator on the committee getting in his or her shot. Ranking Republican Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who just had a melanoma removed, so his bandaged face made him look like he'd come from a street fight -- took an ironic Lay quote from a speech to the Center for Business Ethics and threw it back at him.
Lay sat in his front-row seat, staring blankly. His gold watch sparkled from beneath a monogrammed KLL cuff. His legs twitched almost imperceptibly.
"We need to put the pieces together to find out what has happened," said Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chairman of the consumer affairs subcommittee.
The subcommittee's ranking Republican, Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, of Illinois, was less diplomatic, calling Lay "the most accomplished confidence man since Charles Ponzi." He said he'd be inclined to compare Lay to a carnival barker except "it wouldn't be fair to carnival barkers."
