Cheats, greed and lost billions

ENRON, Lowry, Salford
IF I had seen this play three years ago it would have seemed remarkable and outrageous that a company of cheats and fantasists could lose over $30 billion without anyone noticing.

Since then, of course, less than a decade after the event, the same banks who chased to be part of Enron’s “success”, have thrown even more money into a black hole that almost sunk the world’s financial systems. Even so, it doesn’t detract from an incredible story.

Money, greed and power are the drivers in modern business, which is what Enron, the Texan energy company that grew too big for its ethics, found after making Jeffrey Skilling its CEO.

Enron had built its reputation on producing and selling energy. Skilling turned energy into commodities that could be bought and sold without Enron drilling a single oil well.

The rot began to set in when before this, Skilling introduced the concept of “mark to market” accounting, in which Enron would write up as profit for the year all the profit it expected to make on a long-term contract over several years. This meant Enron grew on paper without any real cash backing.

Chief financial officer Andrew Fastow hid the company’s growing debt in hundreds of parallelcompanies that, gloriously, US law allowed Enron to consider assets.

There is something deeply unpleasant in characters who play with money — and the lives it represents — in this way.

It’s a mentality that gets a fair shakedown in Lucy Prebble’s mightily impressive history of Enron over its black decade, told in dialogue, dance, song, sex and light-sabres — not to mention a terrific set with stock market boards, video and other visual aids to make the complex economics easy.

Corey Johnson is terrific as Skilling, who can’t understand why everyone eventually hates him; Paul Chahidi likewise as the oily Fastow, and Clive Francis is watchably gung-ho as the company founder and chairman, Ken Lay.

Incredible people, but you wouldn’t want them manning the counters at your bank.