Americas

  • United States

Asia

Oceania

by CSO Contributor

Warnings Were Clear, Says Enron Examiner; Boeing Fires Execs for Unethical Conduct; Security Nightmare in Iraq

News
Nov 25, 20032 mins
CSO and CISOData and Information Security

Warnings Were Clear, Says Enron Examiner

Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the former chief executives of Enron Corp., should have seen warning signs that their top subordinates were using complex transactions to mislead investors about the company’s financial condition, a report by a court-appointed bankruptcy examiner concludes. Todays Washington Post reports that the examiner further concludes that there may be grounds to sue Lay and Skilling to recover millions of dollars in loans the company made to them, though he did not uncover smoking-gun evidence that either had direct knowledge of wrongdoing at the company.Boeing Fires Execs for Unethical ConductThe Seattle Post Intelligencer today. The dismissal yesterday comes with Defense Department investigators still looking into the circumstances behind the government’s newly approved deal to acquire 100 Boeing 767 planes for use as midair refueling tankers. The unethical conduct in question was Searss negotiating last year to have the company hire Darleen Druyun at a time when she was working as a senior Air Force procurement official and thus in a position to influence Boeing contracts. She was dismissed along with Sears.

Boeing Co. dismissed its chief financial officer Mike Sears for a breach of ethics just four months after the Pentagon punished it for stealing trade secrets from rival Lockheed Martin to help win rocket contracts, according to a story in

Security Nightmare in IraqBBC News Online report, A U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad has confirmed that 307 suspected “foreign fighters” are currently in detention. The widespread suspicion is that foreign militants, possibly with links to al-Qaeda, may be responsible for the suicide bomb attacks in Iraq over the past few months. These well-planned, high-profile operations, such as the bombing of the UN headquarters, the International Committee of the Red Cross in Baghdad and the Italian police base in Nasiriya, are not thought to have been carried out by Iraqis. What U.S. military commanders need most, reports BBC Foreign Affairs correspondent Peter Bliss, is more intelligence. That is why the rapid recruitment of more Iraqi police and other members of the new security services is now such a priority.

According to a