Enron, 20 years later: Where are the executives now?

Twenty years ago, the rapid rise of Enron — once among the most admired companies in the country — came to an abrupt end, crashing in what was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in U.S history. The key players in the scandal became household names. Here’s where they are today:

The CEO

The famed “golden boy” of Enron, Jeffrey Skilling is back on the Houston energy scene with a new startup.

After serving 12 years in federal prison on fraud and insider trading charges, the former Enron CEO launched Veld Applied Analytics, billed as a sophisticated online platform to invest in oil and gas assets.

The firm’s website claims to use a mathematical technique known as “stochastic evaluation,” explaining, “the quantity and quality of data available for individual energy assets demands sophisticated data handling and management capability.”

A former consultant with McKinsey & Co, Skilling was tapped by Enron founder Ken Lay as CEO and helped turn Enron into an energy powerhouse with projects around the globe. When those investments turned south, Skilling was able to paper over the losses through techniques such as “mark-to-market” accounting, which allowed Enron to claim immediate profits from deals that might never yield a dime.

Skilling declined to comment for this story, but at Veld he has brought on former colleagues from his days at McKinsey. Ron Hulme, who spent more than 26 years at McKinsey and became its global practice leader for oil and gas, lists himself as the part-time chairman of Veld on his LinkedIn page.

While the startup is reportedly generating some buzz among investors, Skilling is still a long way from his high-flying days at Enron when he lived in a $5 million mansion in River Oaks and had a fleet of corporate jets at his disposal.

But he’s not doing too badly. He and his wife Rebecca Carter’s modern-style home in west Houston is assessed at $1.7 million, according to public records.

The CFO

As the chief financial officer of Enron, Andrew Fastow helped hide billions of dollars in losses and debt through off the book partnerships, keeping investors and regulators in the dark as the company’s finances spiraled down.

After cooperating with prosecutors and pleading guilty to wire and securities fraud, Fastow served five years at a federal prison in Louisiana. He was released in 2011 and has since made a career on the public speaking circuit, with one agency listing his availability to lecture on “corporate culture” at universities and corporations around the world for a $10,000 to $20,000 fee.

Reached by email, Fastow declined to be interviewed on his life since Enron but offered the following statement:

“I believe that what I did was wrong, was unethical, and was illegal. I take full responsibility for my actions. I am ashamed and embarrassed every day of my life. To those who were hurt by my actions, directly or indirectly, I apologize. I don’t expect you to accept my apology, but you deserve to hear it.”

The head of Enron International

Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche, the globetrotting former head of Enron International resigned the year before the company declared bankruptcy over a reported disagreement with Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay about the direction of a water subsidiary she led.

Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche reportedly sold her Enron stock for $82.5 million, a prescient move considering 12 months later the stock would be selling for $1 per share. She faced no criminal charges, but later paid Enron shareholders $5.2 million through a settlement with executives.

According to Mark-Jusbasche’s LinkedIn page, she is the president of a Houston company named Resource Development Partners, though it was unclear the company is still in operation. As of last week, she also listed herself as the chairman of Dredgit, a Houston construction and dredging firm.

When a reporter called the company to inquire about Mark-Jusbasche, the man who answered the phone asked what the call was about and then said she did not work at the company. When asked when she had left he hung up. The reference to Dredgit on Mark-Jusbasche’s LinkedIn page was removed later that day.

Mark-Jusbasche did not respond to messages or a phone to call to a home in Taos, N.M. listed to her and her husband.

The whistleblower

Twenty years after warning her bosses at Enron that executives were fraudulently keeping financial losses off the company’s books, Sherron Watkins has become a prominent voice on the perils of corporate greed.

An executive in residence at Texas State University, Watkins lectures on her experience at Enron and the warning signs that a company could be another scandal in the making.

“It’s that classic cautionary tale of a successful company doing all the wrong things,” Watkins, who served as vice president of corporate development at Enron, said in an interview. “There's still so much interest. People say we’re a big successful corporation and they wonder could it happen here.”

After Enron filed for bankruptcy and her name went public as a whistleblower, Watkins said corporate gigs were off the table for her. And while she feels lucky to have found work lecturing, she says she can’t help but miss her days at Enron.

For all the corruption that took place, she maintains Enron was a hugely innovative company that foresaw many current trends two decades before they became mainstream.

“It was so entrepreneurial and innovative. We worked on wind before wind was up and going, and streaming movies before Netflix,” she said. “It all could have turned out very differently had Enron just not played so fast and loose with the numbers.”

The chairman

Kenneth Lay, the founder of Enron, died of a heart attack while on vacation in Aspen, Colo., three months before his sentencing hearing on six counts of fraud and conspiracy.

That conviction was ultimately vacated on the principle the dead do not have the chance to appeal their verdict. Nonetheless, for years the Department of Justice continued to pursue a case against Ken Lay’s estate to try and recover the hundreds of millions of dollars he earned through salary and stock sales while at Enron.

Lay, the son of a Baptist preacher, built Enron out of a 1985 merger between the former Houston Natural Gas Co. and the Omaha-based energy firm InterNorth. By 2000 Enron was reporting annual revenues of $200 billion, making it one of the largest corporations in the country.

A week after his death, the 64-year-old businessman was honored at a memorial service at First United Methodist Church in Houston attended by more than 1,000 people, including former president George H.W. Bush and secretary of state James Baker III. During the service, Rev. William Lawson praised Lay as a “a rich and powerful man,” who did necessarily seek the company of “people who were likewise rich and powerful" and questioned the charges against him.

“I'm angry because Ken was the victim of a lynching,” he told the congregation.

james.osborne@chron.com