Practicalmadness

The BBC reports that former Enron CEO Kenneth Lay is finally due to face indictment in a Houston courtroom tomorrow morning.

Details of the charges against him are contained in sealed indictments and will not be disclosed until then. Prosecutors have been trying to build a case against Mr Lay for over two years and his indictment had been expected.

In June, Mr Lay blamed the fraud on his finance chief, saying he was one of the 98% of Enron staff who were “good, honest, hardworking individuals”.

This statement by Lay strikes me, because according to this other BBC article reporting on the now medium-sized firm’s possible reemergence from Chapter 11 protection this summer, Enron once had 39,000 employees.

Does Lay mean to imply that literally two percent of Enron’s staff — 780 individuals who are not named Kenneth Lay — are, perhaps…evil? Or perhaps that 780 individuals, all with management responsibilities, the ability to restructure the company and its partnerships and access to Enron’s financial records, were embroiled in a massive conspiracy to hide growing debts from the feds, and that he didn’t once suspect that any of these 780 co-workers might be up to something?

I’d be interested to know how many of the 39,000 workers employed by Enron in 2001 were based out of the company’s Houston headquarters. While I suspect that it may be more than 780, I also suspect that 780 people would constitute a vast majority of the workforce there.

So not only did these nefarious people conspire to defraud Enron’s investors and evade prosecution, but they could have tampered with the voting for the name of the new corporate newsletter! (Which might also explain how “We Didn’t Do It, You Can’t Prove Anything” became a surprise front-runner in that contest.)

The moral of this story, at least, is that “98%” does not mean the same as “pretty much everybody” when your company has 39,000 people on staff.