Financial Scandals
Financial Scandals Among the financial scandals involving Wall Street, the Enron scandal is arguably the most well-known. In the late 1990s, Enron was a high-flying energy services company and a stock market darling. Shareholders could have lost as much as $74 billion when it finally collapsed. In order to inflate sales and conceal debts, the CEO, Jeff Skilling, and the CFO, Andrew Fastow, employed a variety of questionable accounting techniques. As a result, while having debt, the corporation gave off the impression of being the most profitable in history. Enron was able to easily raise additional funding to continue the ruse thanks to the appearance of a sound balance sheet and sizable revenues. Most of the fraud was committed between 1998 and 2001 resulting in the stock price trading as high as $90.56. During this period CEO Ken Lay gave Skilling more and more authority, which Skilling used to manipulate the company’s accounts. The co