NY Times' "Enron for Dummies"
To keep its mystique alive and its stock price growing, it set up partnerships where it could bury its losses, or generate imaginary revenues. Here's one of the more audacious examples, pieced together by The Wall Street Journal: Enron invested a bunch of money in a joint venture with Blockbuster to rent out movies online. The deal flopped eight months later. But in the meantime Enron had secretly set up a partnership with a Canadian bank. The bank essentially lent Enron $115 million in exchange for Enron's profits from the movie venture over its first 10 years. The Blockbuster deal never made a penny, but Enron counted the Canadian loan as a nice, fat profit.
