Excerpts from Books and Wikipedia
"The worst terrorist atrocity in US history was followed a few months later by one of the country's most spectacular and scandalous bankruptcies. . . . Its profits and assets figures were largely false--in some cases grossly exaggerated and in others completely fabricated. Debts and losses had been hidden away offshore. . . . The discovery that this much-admired company had been relying on skillfully organized accounting fraud made Enron a byword for corporate greed, ruthless corruption, and the dark face of capitalism." [Furtado: 1001 Days] "Enron Corporation was an American energy, commodities, and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was founded in 1985 as the result of a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies in the U.S. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,000 staff and was one of the world's major electricity, natural gas, communications and pulp and paper companies, with claimed revenues of nearly $111 billion during 2000. Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.
At the end of 2001, it was revealed that its reported financial condition was sustained by institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. Enron has since become a well-known example of willful corporate fraud and corruption. The scandal also brought into question the accounting practices and activities of many corporations in the United States and was a factor in the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. The scandal also affected the greater business world by causing the dissolution of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm." [Wikipedia]