In essence the epicenter of the mess at Enron and he never came clean. EES (Enron Energy Services) was the hub of the Ponzi scheme energy trading scam. He either knew about it and was complicit or he didn't know and was incompetent. Either way, he's a bum (well, I live in California...Come to think of it, this is the very subject that got me to DU in the first place!).
<snip>
Touted as a burgeoning profit center, Enron Energy Services reported a pretax operating profit of $103 million on revenues of $4.6 billion in 2000. But EES was a fraud, hemorrhaging money while covering up its losses with accounting maneuvers. Its profit in 2000, according to Enron vice president Sherron Watkins, was created by counting ersatz financial trading gains from one of the infamous off-budget Raptor partnerships. The recently released special investigation of Enron's board of directors concluded that those transactions violated accounting rules. White and EES chairman Lou Pai made millions, but the venture they ran was so mismanaged that in February 2001 Enron executives brought in another leadership team to clean up the mess.
Enron Energy Services was set up to compete with public utilities in selling energy to large enterprises like JC Penney, the Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago and the US Army. Enron would sign long-term contracts to provide energy at a sharply reduced fixed price. It would then install energy-saving devices to lower its clients' energy needs and use its trading savvy to supply that energy at bargain prices.
From the beginning, though, Enron's follow-through was something of a joke. "They knew how to get a product out there, but they didn't know how to run a business," former EES employee Tony Dorazio told the New York Times. Glenn Dickson, an EES director laid off in December, charged that White and Pai "are definitely responsible for the fact that we sold huge contracts with little thought as to how we were going to manage the risk or deliver the service."
Perhaps Pai and White were more concerned about selling than fulfilling contracts because they were making their money on the front end, benefiting from Enron's aggressive accounting practices. When Enron signed a ten-year contract with a customer, it would project its revenues and profits over the ten years and book all of them as received in the first year of the sale. This "mark to market" accounting is a generally accepted accounting practice--but only when the revenues and costs can be reliably projected. EES had to predict future energy prices, the pace of energy deregulation in different states and the conservation savings of its customers over many years. It then paid its managers and sales personnel bonuses based on those projections. This was an irresistible invitation to what former EES employee Jeff Gray called "illusory earnings."
<more>
www.ourfuture.org/onmessage/borosage/3_11_02.cfm 
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is white the enron guy?
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He was the EES guy at Enron!
