Daily Archives: January 24, 2006

Could you pass this along to O’Reilly?

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Bill O'Reilly2.jpgAlways a source of common sense, the W$J’s George Melloan passes along this timely column today in which he patiently explains that demagogic calls for more control of energy markets is precisely the opposite approach that legislators need to be taking in response to rising energy prices. In so doing, he passes along this pearl of simple wisdom, which the confused Bill O’Reilly could really use:

But it’s also deplorably true that when constituents complain about soaring prices of natural gas and gasoline, [politicians seeking more regulation] have a ready scapegoat, “the giant oil companies.” Anyone still buying that line should ask himself why the “giant oil companies,” with all their market power, somehow couldn’t prevent crude oil from collapsing to $10 a barrel a few years ago.

What? You mean there is discovery in a civil lawsuit?

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Spitzer52.jpgThis Wall Street Journal ($) article reports that New York AG (“attorney general” or “aspiring governor,” take your pick) Eliot Spitzer is shocked, yes, shocked that he and his office may be subjected to discovery in the civil lawsuits that Spitzer is pursuing against former AIG chairman and CEO Maurice “Hank” Greenberg and former NYSE chairman and CEO, Richard Grasso:
The Journal reports that a subject of the defense’s quite reasonable discovery requests in both the Grasso and Greenberg lawsuits involve internal reviews that the NYSE and AIG conducted after both companies had been pressured by Spitzer to oust the executives. Grasso and Greenberg contend that the internal reviews — which mirror Spitzer’s cases against the two men — were shams because the companies had incentives to blame past managers to curry favor with the Lord of Regulation:

“Mr. Spitzer was personally involved in pressuring a firm to help the AG’s office try to make a case against Grasso, and he ought to be willing to explain that,” says [Gerson] Zweifach, [a] Grasso lawyer.
“We have many reasons to believe the AG colluded with AIG to concoct an investigation that would justify the forced retirement of Mr. Greenberg and baseless ‘fraud’ accusation made by the AG on national TV,” said Nicholas A. Gravante, Jr., an attorney for Mr. Greenberg with Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP. “We intend to use every available legal option to force the AG to turn over all evidence to which Mr. Greenberg is entitled.”

H’mm. I wonder whether Spitzer’s dockside bully tactics will work on a civil court judge?

The focused Mr. Skilling

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Jeff SkillingT2.jpgFollowing on this earlier profile, the Chronicle’s Mike Tolson provides this extensive profile today of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling as he gears up for the commencement of the Super Bowl of Enron criminal trials next Monday.
Echoing thoughts that have long been presented on this blog, Skilling in the article talks about the difficulty of defending himself in an intensely anti-Enron environment:

Skilling, as ever, insists Enron was a great, innovative company that did not deserve the fate that befell it.
“It was a complicated business, and the fact that it was complicated led to misrepresentations and a lot of what I call the urban myth of Enron,” [Skilling] said.
Rather than gather enough information to understand it, he said, people accept popular notions that it was a house of cards, perpetuated by fraud, and that Skilling was a master manipulator of impressionable young MBAs and a supersmart bamboozler who persuaded investors to buy overpriced stock so he could keep raking in fortunes in stock options.
“The way I have been portrayed is a caricature,” he said. “I don’t care what book or movie or article you are talking about, the caricature has been created and the real person kind of loses out in the process.”

Then, Skilling asks a very common sense question:

“If I were who I have been made out to be, could I have built a company? Who would have followed such a guy that has been portrayed like that?”