Radio 1 88-90fm
Programme 7: 18th December 2006
By 2000, the Enron Corporation was a colossus. It was America's seventh largest company, employed 27,000 staff, and was a multi-billion dollar operation. Its management were close friends of both Bush presidents, and were making - in some cases - hundreds of millions of dollars each. A year later, in the fall out that followed the Enron implosion, it emerged that - months before the scandal broke - one voice inside Enron had been trying to alert management to the looming accounting scandal.
Sherron Watkins was the Enron Vice President who sent an anonymous memo to company CEO, Kenneth Lay, writing: "I am incredibly nervous that we will implode in a wave of accounting scandals. the business world will consider the past successes as nothing but an elaborate accounting hoax." She then went on to confront him in person about the corrupt practices. After the scandal, she remained at Enron, but was internally isolated.
