Enron ‘pretty fast and loose with its rules’

Enron regularly used money from its reserves to manipulate profits, a former senior executive at the US energy firm has testified.

David Delainey told the trial of former Enron bosses Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling that hiding losses was “standard operating procedure”.

“At Enron, we tended to be pretty fast and loose with its rules,” he said.

Mr Delainey said he told Mr Skilling, Enron’s former chief executive, in 2001 that a proposal to subsume losses at its retail arm within its profitable wholesale business “lacked integrity”.

“There was no business purpose to this other than to hide the loss and I knew that was not proper,” Mr Delainey, the former head of Enron’s wholesale trading business, told jurors.

“(Skilling) looked at me and said ‘what do you want to do?’,” Mr Delainey, added.

When asked by prosecutors what he believed Mr Causey meant, Mr Delainey said: “Get in line.”

However, despite feeling under constant pressure to put a gloss on Enron’s financial status, Mr Delainey said that he was never actually told by either Mr Skilling or Mr Lay to break the law.