September 28, 2001.
After the meeting with Greg Whalley, Andy Fastow, Ken Lay, Rick Causey and a few others, Ken Lay had made the executive decision to unwind Raptors. Today in Enron history, Enron did so.
According to the Powers report, Enron calculated the Raptors’ combined assets were approximately $2.5 billion and their liabilities $3.2 billion. This would result, in the next month, of a write-off of $544 million.
Meanwhile, at the Arthur Andersen office in Chicago, a young attorney named Nancy Temple was invited to a conference call to deal with Enron’s third-quarter accounting issues. The reasons given in the literature on the subject indicate that AA’s Enron team on the ground was in conflict with the Professional Standards Group, what Jeff Skilling called at his trial the “rocket scientists of accountants.” It was time to involve the lawyers.
After the meeting, another attorney asked Nancy Temple what documents should be kept from all this. Andersen had a policy on document retention, Temple replied, and explained that the policy was to keep the original and final drafts of memos from David Duncan (head of the Enron account). Everything else, including emails, should be destroyed. It was Andersen’s policy.
