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Evidence receipt / uncertainty

Published · transcript-backed

David Rosenthal: uncertainty

29 Nov 2022 Acquired Enron

“I know what's on our balance sheet, but let's add up all the obligations we have with all these special-purpose entities that we've done. Fastow is like, I don't know.”

— David Rosenthal

Source trail

Everything needed to verify it.

Speaker
David Rosenthal
Attribution
Verified speaker
Claim type
uncertainty
Recorded
29 Nov 2022
Publisher
Acquired
Episode
Enron

Transcript context

…He surprise resigns the same day with no transition. Yeah, no transition. He's just like, I'm out. Gone. Lay comes back in and two things happen. One, he asks Fastow, the CFO, he's trying to get a handle on what's going on here. Again, he's been out to lunch for years at this point, both metaphorically and literally speaking. He asked Fastow to say like, okay, what's the current debt obligations of Enron? I know what's on our balance sheet, but let's add up all the obligations we have with all these special-purpose entities that we've done. Fastow is like, I don't know. Let me go work on that, and I'll come back to you. And the answer was literally that he didn't know, because they did not keep this stuff in a centralized location. They signed all this paper through all these different entities, and there was not a central ledger anywhere with who owes what to who.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.

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