Enron

1. An American corporation based in Houston, Texas, that traded in energy and filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in December 2001. Enron's collapse stunned most investors and analysts because Enron, the seventh largest corporation in the United States, had long reported huge earnings. Subsequent investigations revealed that Enron had inflated its earnings by hiding its debt and losses in subsidiary partnerships. Although some of the company's top executives made huge profits as Enron fell apart, many of its employees saw their retirement savings in Enron's 401(k) plan wiped out by the collapse of Enron's share price.

Enron's collapse raised many questions about the reliability of corporate financial statements and the potentially cozy relationships between accountants and the firms they audit.

Example Sentences

The most extreme of these critiques compared the company’s business practices to those of Enron, WorldCom and Lucent Technologies.

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“As well, I am not claiming Nvidia is Enron. It is clearly Cisco.”

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Vinny was a lower-middle-class kid whose mother was proud of him for getting into any college at all and prouder still when, in 1994, after Vinny graduated from SUNY–Binghamton, he’d gotten himself hired in Manhattan by Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that would be destroyed a few years later, in the Enron scandal.

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Chanos first came to prominence shorting Enron before it went bankrupt and at one point in 2008 his hedge fund, known for its shorting strategies, ran about $6 billion under management.

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The investor who foresaw the collapse of Enron, he has one of the most sensitive noses for financial chicanery — and the ebbs and flows of investor credulence — in the business.

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