(C) Common Dreams
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ENRON'S MANY STRANDS: EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION; Enron Paid Huge Bonuses in '01; Experts See a Motive for Cheating [1]
['Kurt Eichenwald']
Date: 2002-03-01
The Enron Corporation paid its executives huge one-time bonuses last year as a reward for hitting a series of stock-price targets ending in 2000 -- the very time, investigators now say, when corporate officials were improperly inflating the company's profits by as much as a billion dollars.
The bonus payments and other special cash distributions include some $320 million paid just 10 months before Enron's collapse into bankruptcy, according to company records. Legal experts said that the payments could provide strong evidence of a motive for the financial machinations that investigators think distorted the company's reported performance and ultimately led to its demise. Without those efforts, the profit and stock price levels required to obtain the money almost certainly would not have been reached.
Details of the bonuses -- as well as other payments totaling more than $432 million made to almost 2,000 corporate executives during the two years before Enron's collapse -- are described in spreadsheets and data maintained on the corporate computers, information that has been obtained by federal prosecutors. Copies of the spreadsheets were also obtained by The New York Times.
An Enron spokesman said that bonus payments at the company were linked to a variety of factors, and did not differ significantly from similar programs offered by other companies. ''They were all performance-based programs, which is pretty standard for most corporations,'' the spokesman, Eric Thode, said.
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[1] Url:
https://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/business/enron-s-many-strands-executive-compensation-enron-paid-huge-bonuses-01-experts.html
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