Evidence receipt / uncertainty
Published · transcript-backedDavid 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.”
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.…
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