HOUSTON, Jan 25: Former Enron Corp vice chairman J. Clifford Baxter committed suicide on Friday with a gunshot to the head, Texas police said.
Sugar Land police department spokeswoman Patricia Whitty said Baxter was found inside his car early on Friday with a self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head, and a suicide note at his side. There were no apparent signs of foul play, she said.
Enron confirmed the death in a short statement: “We are deeply saddened by the tragic loss of our friend and colleague, Cliff Baxter.”
Baxter was vice chairman of the collapsed energy trader when he resigned in May last year. He had reportedly feuded with then-Chief Executive Officer Jeffrey Skilling over the propriety of off-balance sheet transactions that hid billions in debt and ultimately triggered the once-mighty Houston company’s spiral into the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.
“Cliff Baxter complained mightily to Skilling and all who would listen about the inappropriateness of our transactions,” Enron whistle-blower Sherron Watkins wrote to Chairman and CEO Ken Lay, who resigned on Wednesday, in an Aug 14 letter.
Enron in October became the focus on an investigation by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission over the off-balance sheet transactions. Separate investigations were later taken up by various committees in Congress, and the Justice and Labor departments.
Baxter was the lead negotiator on Enron’s purchase of Portland General Electric in 1997. He joined Enron in 1991, and was chairman and CEO of Enron North America before being named chief strategy officer. In October 2000, he was promoted to vice chairman.
According to court records and securities filings, Baxter earned some $35.2 million by exercising Enron stock options, including $9 million in 2001 alone.
He lived in Sugar Land, a suburb on Houston’s southwestern border.
CAMPAIGN MONEY: Almost all of the U.S. legislators serving on congressional committees investigating Enron Corp have received campaign contributions from the fallen energy trading giant or its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, The New York Times reported on Friday.
Of the 248 Senators and members of the House of Representatives on 11 congressional committees investigating the firm, 212 received donations from the two companies, according to an analysis by The New York Times and the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-profit research group that tracks money in politics.
The newspaper reported that the pervasiveness of donations from the companies to US politicians of both Republican and Democratic parties led one public interest group, TomPaine.com, to say that the question was not, “Who should recuse themselves from the Enron hearings?” but “Who shouldn’t?”
The House Energy and Commerce Committee and a Senate committee were the first of the panels to begin hearings. They started on Thursday, but lawmakers got few answers from Andersen about why its employees shredded thousands of documents related to audits of Enron Corp.
Enron swiftly collapsed last year, impoverishing employees’ retirement accounts, laying off thousands of workers and wiping out billions of dollars in shareholder equity.
Politicians have moved quickly to erase financial connections to Enron, donating its campaign contributions to charity or to a fund for former Enron employees in need.
Campaign finance reform advocates have applauded politicians who returned the money, but they believe it would be impractical for members of Congress to recuse themselves from the probe.
“There won’t be anyone left to conduct the investigation,” the Times quoted Scott Harshbarger, president of Common Cause, as saying.
The report said that each of the top 20 Senate recipients of campaign donations from Enron serve on at least one committee investigating Enron. In the past four years, Enron’s political action committee donated nearly $2 million to senators and House members, including generous contributions to those investigating the company’s collapse and filing for bankruptcy protection.
According to the analysis by The New York Times and the Center for Responsive Politics, 43 of the 57 members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee have received money from Enron and 52 of the committee’s 57 members have received donations from Andersen.—Reuters
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