Enron
Uncovering the Uncovered Story
[Extrait de
www.cjr.org/year/02/2/sherman.asp]
The
man who first laid Enron bare was not a journalist. In October 2000,
a hedge-fund manager named James Chanos began to scrutinize the
company's financial statements and was astonished by what he discovered:
murky references to "related party" transactions involving Enron's
senior officers, and massive insider selling. Chanos attacked the
documents, filling the margins with exclamation points and notations,
and marking dubious footnotes with yellow Post-its. In November 2000, he
shorted the stock, and the result, when the price plunged, was a
windfall for himself and his clients. In February 2001, Chanos tipped
off a reporter at Fortune, Bethany McLean, who in March, published a
story entitled "Is Enron Overpriced?" That story was a link in a
chain of events that eventually destroyed the company and ignited one of
the most explosive corporate scandals in U.S. history.
(...)
In
recent months, journalists have undertaken a ferocious assault on Enron.
Two seasoned reporters from The Wall Street Journal, Rebecca Smith and
John Emshwiller, led the pack. In a devastating fusillade of articles in
mid-October, they forced Enron's clandestine "partnerships" out into the
open, as Enron's stock price tumbled. The Journal followed up with a
massive barrage of detailed, critical reporting, some of which contained
bold assertions about energy policy and deregulation. On November 30,
Smith, one of the country's leading energy reporters, wrote a page one
story, shock waves: enron's swoon leaves a grand experiment in a State
of disarray. "It was one of the great fantasies of American business,"
Smith's article began. "A deregulated market that would send cheaper and
more reliable supplies of electricity coursing into homes and offices
across the nation."
(...)
On August
19, 2001, in response to Skilling's resignation and a concurrent fall in
the stock price, the Houston Chronicle business columnist Jim Barlow
announced: "It's still a company with innovative people who have shown
they can turn ideas into profitable businesses. That's why the
current problems will blow over."
To
excavate back issues of magazines like Forbes, Fortune, Worth, Business
2.0, and Red Herring is to enter a parallel universe of cheerleading and
obsequiousness, a universe where applause obliterated skepticism. In
April 2000, Fortune, for instance, published a long tribute to Enron.
The gaudy, sycophantic lead deserves to be reproduced in full, for it is
a cautionary specimen of credulous, fin de siècle financial journalism:
Imagine a
country-club dinner dance, with a bunch of old fogies and their wives
shuffling around halfheartedly to the not-so-stirring sounds of Guy
Lombardo and his All-Tuxedo Orchestra. Suddenly young Elvis comes
crashing through the skylight, complete with gold-lamé suit, shiny
guitar, and gyrating hips. Half the waltzers faint; most of the others
get angry or pouty. And a very few decide they like what they hear, tap
their feet . . . start grabbing new partners, and suddenly are rocking
to a very different tune. In the staid world of regulated utilities and
energy companies, Enron Corp. is that gate-crashing Elvis. Once a
medium-sized player in the stupefyingly soporific gas-pipeline business,
Enron in the past decade has become far and away the most vigorous agent
of change in its industry.
(...)
For six years in a row, industry
insiders voted Enron "Most Innovative" among Fortune's "Most Admired
Companies" -- a list that purports to be "the definitive report card on
corporate reputations." (In February 2001, Enron ranked second in
"quality of management" as well.) In January 2000, Business Week
showcased Kenneth Lay as one of the "25 Top Managers" of 2000.
(...)
The print
media coverage of Enron's top executives was pure hagiography. According
to Fortune, Kenneth Lay was a "revolutionary," while Worth, explaining
Lay's "personal strengths," quoted an analyst saying he possessed "the
best combination of vision and execution of anyone." Jeffrey Skilling,
in Fortune's sonorous pronouncement, was "the most intellectually
brilliant executive in the natural gas business." He was also, Fortune
suggested, an unpretentious, all-American family man -- "a lively,
impish character who disdains the huge, serene, high walled office he
occupies atop the Enron building, forty stories above downtown Houston.
'Too quiet. Too removed,' he complains. (His kids often play Koosh ball
in it and store their racquets in a corner.)"
(...)
Not
every news organization bowed to the cowboy traders from Houston. By and
large, Business Week's coverage of Enron in the 1990s was free of
boosterism and free-market zealotry. For one thing, it didn't descend
into hero worship. When Forbes (and Fortune) depicted Rebecca Mark as
infallible, Business Week declined to worship. "It has been a rough few
weeks for Rebecca P. Mark," the magazine reported in September 1995. "On
August 3, [Mark] had her biggest deal, in India, abruptly cancelled
after a state government review . . . Then, back in the U.S., on a
vacation to unwind, she was tossed into a cactus while on a horseback
excursion."
Even more
skeptical was The Economist, which generally refused to mount the
Enron bandwagon. In 1998, The Economist noted that while "Enron's
famously pushy lobbyists are doing their best to force the pace" of
electricity deregulation, the company's goal of turning electricity into
"a price-driven commodity" is "quite a gamble." "Spend long enough
around top Enron people," the magazine wrote in a searching report in
June 2000, "and you feel you are in the midst of some sort of
evangelical cult. In a sense you are. Mr. Lay, with his 'passion for
markets,' is the cult's guru." The Economist zeroed in on Lay's hubris:
"Asking him to admit even the slightest mistake is tougher than pulling
teeth. This is odd, for the blunderbuss approach to innovation that is
intrinsic to such an opportunistic firm as Enron is bound to produce a
few failures. Given all his successes, surely failures should be proudly
displayed as red badges of courage?" Concluded The Economist: "Is Enron
really so flawless?"
Even
those magazines that were somewhat skeptical of the company never took
the time to investigate Enron's byzantine finances. One journalist who
made that effort was Jonathan Weil of The Wall Street Journal.
Educated at the University of Colorado and Southern Methodist University
Law School, Weil got his first job at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in
Little Rock, where he spent some two years before moving to the
Journal's Texas staff in 1997 as a contributor to the weekly Texas
Journal, a four-page stand-alone section that appeared inside Texas
editions of the Journal. (Texas Journal was shut down, along with the
other zoned editions, in late 2000.)
(...)
Weil's piece never appeared in the national edition of The Wall
Street Journal; it was The Story That Got Away. Journal editors in New
York never ordered a follow-up, and nearly a year would pass before
Skilling's resignation inspired other Journal reporters to focus on
Enron. These days, Weil, who is now the Journal's accounting
reporter in New York, is rather melancholy: "I do regret not having
revisited Enron," he says. "What I should have done, in retrospect, was
rewrite that story for the national edition." But Weil's efforts were
not in vain: On the same day his story came out in Texas, it appeared on
the Dow Jones newswire, where it was seen by James Chanos, who now
acknowledges Weil's Texas Journal piece as the primary catalyst for his
own exhaustive research into Enron's finances. (Enron, for its part,
didn't much care for Weil's piece. Several days before it appeared,
Enron flew seven executives, accountants, and p.r. people to Weil's
office in Dallas. After it was published, he got a laconic e-mail
message from Enron's top PR man, who wrote: "As you might imagine, we
had some problems with the story, principally with the lead questioning
the quality of our earnings . . .")
Weil's loss
was Fortune's gain. Chanos had been a source for the Fortune reporter
Bethany McLean, and the short-seller, who is well known in financial
circles, briefed her about Enron. "I would never have thought of looking
at Enron if he hadn't tipped me off," McLean says. "There's no question
about that. I'm not a beat reporter, so there's no reason I would have
looked at Enron." After doing her own analysis of Enron's finances
(without the benefit of Weil's piece, which she says she never saw) and
conferring with skeptical analysts, Mclean, in March 2001, produced "Is
Enron Overpriced?" -- a piece that bristled with questions like "How
exactly does Enron make its money?" and general inquiries about the
company's financial health. When she attempted to interview Skilling, he
said her questions were "unethical" and hung up on her. Enron executives
flew to New York to answer her questions. Later, Kenneth Lay himself
called Fortune's managing editor, Rik Kirkland, and implied he should
spike McLean's piece; Kirkland refused. (McLean and her editor,
Joseph Nocera, along with the Fortune writer Peter Elkind, have since
signed a book deal with Penguin-Putnam, reportedly for more than $1
million.) Ever so slowly, skepticism started to spread. On May 9, 2001,
Peter Eavis, of TheStreet.com, tipped by another short-seller, mentioned
the shady "related entities" and linked one to Andrew Fastow, Enron's
former chief financial officer. (...)
Amid
the wreckage of Enron, one question looms large: Should the press
have tackled Enron earlier? Some journalists contend that it was
virtually impossible to do so. "If a company is lying to the SEC,"
says Jonathan Friedland of the Journal, "and to regulators, and it's
getting its accountants to sign off on its lies, and it's getting
lawyers to offer opinions congruent with those lies, it's impossible to
find that stuff out unless you have a whistleblower come forward." It's
a compelling argument with a strong element of truth, but it overlooks
the fact that reporters and analysts (like Weil and Chanos and McLean)
who plunged into Enron's finances became instantly suspicious about what
they found. If the U.S. press had followed up on the questions posed
by The Economist in June 2000 -- and by the Texas Journal three months
later -- the contours of the story could have emerged earlier.
(...)
It's not enough, some journalists insist, to fine-tune reporting
techniques. For them, the fall of Enron is not merely a story about a
company that cooked its books and lied to its employees, but a window
into larger, more systemic questions about the role of the press in
making sure that important policy shifts are debated and discussed.
"There's been almost no debate about deregulation," says American
Prospect co-editor (and Business Week columnist) Robert Kuttner. "It's
just been taken for granted in the business press, and in the
editorials, and to some extent in the halls of Congress, that
deregulation is just the right and the natural thing to do. It's the
'wave of the future,' and markets 'work,' and all of the ancient,
well-documented reasons why there are market failures somehow have
allegedly been overtaken by the New Economy. It was nonsense then and
it's nonsense now."
(...)
In the end,
what can the press learn from this affair? Certain things are obvious:
Business reporters should ponder their reliance on Wall Street
analysts, while expanding their contacts to include consumer advocates,
mavericks, and independent-minded employees. The "underlying
problem" for business journalists, says Business Week's Shepard, is that
corporate "accounting has gotten very difficult to understand." In his
view, there is a clear lesson for Business Week: "We're all going to get
a lot more sophisticated about accounting," he says. "You can't take for
granted the signed accountant's statement anymore. You really have to
look into it a little bit more, and when there's a little bit of
trouble, you really have to dig in."
(...) [There were]
a handful of skeptical
reporters, and one ingenious money manager, who, by employing the time-honored
techniques of investigative reporting, enriched himself and his clients,
and put his country's press to shame.
Scott
Sherman
Voici, en
revanche, ce qu'écrivait
Libération
au sujet des médias
après la chute de l'ancien patron de Vivendi (16 août 2002):
«Maître de l'univers», l'été
dernier...
C'était il y a tout juste un an.
Jean-Marie Messier, alors patron de Vivendi, passe un été de star.
L'entreprise annonce toujours des résultats satisfaisants. Célébré des
deux côtés de l'Atlantique, très remarqué à la télévision (il a
participé aux émissions de Michel Drucker, de Thierry Ardisson et de
Michel Field), J2M aborde l'été sur les chapeaux de roue. Voici à quoi
aurait pu ressembler, alors, son journal d'été.
Le 3 juillet. J'ai eu raison de
demander à la photographe Bettina Rheims de me remettre la Légion
d'honneur. «Je vous attendais avec des rondeurs, vous arrivez mince et
bronzé», lance-t-elle. Je ne suis pas mécontent que Bernard Arnault, le
PDG de LVMH, et Serge Tchuruk, celui d'Alcatel, soient là... Surtout
pour écouter la suite du speech de Bettina : «Au fond, je me suis amusée
à imaginer vos vies à venir, et je dis : vos vies, parce que je pense
qu'il y en a plusieurs. On peut très bien vous voir dans vingt ans à la
tête de cette entreprise, qui aura au passage absorbé Disney, la Fox et
que sais-je encore ? [...]D'autres vous imagineront peut-être à
l'Elysée. [...]. Je crois, au fond, mon cher Jean-Marie, que vous êtes,
contrairement à ce que tous les journaux écrivent, un aventurier. Et,
dans ma bouche, c'est évidemment un compliment, sans doute le plus beau
que je puisse vous faire.»
Le 24 juillet. J'annonce des résultats
supérieurs aux prévisions pour le second trimestre. Je suis d'autant
plus satisfait qu'AOL Time Warner, lui, a déçu les analystes en
annonçant les siens. Même Edouard Tétreau, de Crédit Lyonnais Securities
(qui ne me loupera pas par la suite), considère que «c'est un parcours
sans faute. Vivendi se détache de l'univers des TMT (technologies et
médias) en étant l'une des seules grandes valeurs à ne pas faire de
profit warning [avertissement sur les profits].»
Le 6 août. Je lis Time avec
délectation. «Maître de l'univers», titre l'hebdomadaire américain, qui
consacre pas moins de sept pages au «dirigeant beau parleur avec une
tignasse à la Kennedy». C'est moi ! Mais je ne comprends pas bien cette
comparaison avec Napoléon : «Comme le petit général, il pourrait se
trouver en difficulté en livrant une bataille de trop.
Le 9 août. Je prépare le déménagement
de ma famille à Manhattan, dans mon nouvel appartement de 19,9 millions
d'euros sur Park Avenue. J'espère bien convaincre ainsi les
investisseurs américains de la stratégie «globale» du groupe.
Le 27 août. J'annonce avec émotion le
rachat de l'Olympia, le célèbre music-hall parisien. Je ne ménage pas
mes effets pendant la conférence de presse. Ce «rêve pour tous les
artistes français», je vais en «assurer la pérennité». Je vais aussi
«contribuer à lancer de nouveaux artistes». Parce que «la musique, c'est
pas seulement un business, c'est aussi de l'émotion».
Le 3 septembre. Le magazine américain
Fortune me consacre huit pages et revient sur ma remise de Légion
d'honneur. Ils racontent comment j'ai entonné le tube de Stevie Wonder I
Just Called to Say I Love You... «Jean-Marie Messier se délecte en étant
un provocateur. Il n'est pas seulement l'homme d'affaires français le
plus fameux ; il est le premier PDG rock star du pays.» Mais comme je
leur ai dit : «Je ne suis pas un acteur [...]. J'ai des sentiments
humains et je les exprime. C'est ma manière d'être.»
