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Add to this bizarre tale Bush's weekend proposal to protect the pensions of Amereican workers: proposals which WOULD NOT HAVE PROTECTED employees of ENRON.
After Enron, the World Cries Foul
Alan Cowell New York Times Service
Sunday, February 3, 2002
The world is watching the unfolding of the Enron bankruptcy and its aftershocks through local lenses of sometimes surprising hues.
The Enron affair's many tendrils have yielded sudden partisan acrimony in Britain, a revival of an old story of influence-wielding in Argentina and a hardening of attitudes about free-market capitalism, corruption and hubris in many quarters. It has even found echoes in an unrelated but resonant insurance and accounting scandal in Australia. And news organizations around the world have taken up the theme of American political probity. In regions where American voices have publicly com-plained of opaque practices, political favoritism or corruption, editorial writers and columnists have avidly turned the tables and thrown Enron back at the United States as evidence of hypocrisy.
'How could all this have happened on Wall Street, the benchmark (or so Asians were told in 1997) of corporate transparency?' The Straits Times of Singapore said in an editorial. 'The simple answer is: The U.S. government let it happen.' The paper went on to cite 'the legalized corruption that passes for U.S. lawmaking' as a contributing factor. The political side of the story reverberated in Argentina, where the Bush family has had business interests since the mid-1980s. In an article a week ago in the daily La Nacion, a former minister of public works, Rodolfo Terragno, said he was pressed on Enron's behalf in 1988 by 'a son of the vice president,' who he believes was George W. Bush.
According to Mr. Terragno's account, which also surfaced during the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, Enron wanted to build a gas pipeline in Argentina and pay just 15 percent of the international market price for gas. When he rejected the proposal as 'clearly not in the national interest,' he was lobbied, he said, first by the U.S. ambassador and then by a mysterious caller from Washington who invoked a very powerful name.
'Mr. Minister, I'm the son of the vice president, and I've just returned from a campaign trip with my father,' Mr. Terragno recalled the conversation's beginning. 'I'm calling you because I know you have a proposal from Enron sitting on your desk. I want to tell you that in my opinion this would be a good thing for your country and would strengthen ties between Argentina and the United States.'
Mr. Terragno, now a senator, reaffirmed that account in an interview at his office in Buenos Aires. He said that because the caller never gave his name, he could not be certain who it was, but that he had concluded it must have been George W. Bush because he was already acquainted with Neil Bush, the only other son of Vice President George Bush then involved in the Argentine oil business.
Given the accusations of improprieties in the Enron collapse, newspapers in Malaysia, Thailand and elsewhere in Asia have bristled with resentment of past U.S. pretensions to the moral high ground. In India, where Enron squabbled with a state government for years over its Dabhol power station, an editorial in The Business Standard acknowledged that India's business culture was rife with problems but said, 'The U.S. will no longer be able to preach about crony capitalism or corporate governance to others.'
In Australia, auditors are the center of local attention because of the role of Arthur Andersen, which audited Enron's books, in another corporate collapse. A high-level panel is investigating the March 2001 failure of HIH Ltd., the second-largest insurer in the country.
Some newspapers in Canada, where Enron has a substantial presence, have taken the company's crash as an occasion to return to long-standing complaints about the United States, though the perceived American sins run more toward excesses of arrogance, greed and social Darwinism.
'The notion that ordinary workers can trust the stock market with their retirement funds has been debunked,' Margaret Wente wrote in The Globe and Mail. 'There are lots of villains in America. You just need to know where to look.'
In Hong Kong, a redoubt of ultracapitalist views and a place where investor-unfriendly disclosure practices are common, The South China Morning Post was somewhat more circumspect. 'Every society has its rats, sleazebags and back-scratchers,' the paper wrote in an editorial. 'Anti-Americans would argue that the U.S. has more than its fair share, just as anti-Europeans would point to corruption in Brussels.'
The noisiest Enron fallout so far has occurred in Britain, where opposition legislators are demanding a formal investigation of contacts between the Labour Party of Prime Minister Tony Blair and Enron executives, saying that Enron lobbying may have won favorable policy changes for its businesses.
Through a spokesman, Mr. Blair denied last week that there was any impropriety in the government's dealings with Enron, but he acknowledged that government ministers who dealt with regulatory or energy issues met with Enron executives on four occasions dating back to 1998, a year after Mr. Blair took office. A Labour Party official also acknowledged that the party had accepted around $51,000 from Enron in the form of sponsorship for events.
It was in Britain, too, that the Enron affair claimed its first high-profile victim outside the United States.
John Wakeham, a former energy minister with links to Enron dating to 1994, withdrew from his job as head of the Press Complaints Commission, Britain's newspaper watchdog, to devote his full energies to clearing his name.
Lord Wakeham, who oversaw the privatization of British electricity during the Thatcher era of the 1980s, was a nonexecutive director of Enron and a member of its audit committee. He flew to the United States last week to consult lawyers and cooperate with congressional inquiries.
Prince's Trust Received Gift
A charity headed by Prince Charles received £800,000 ($1.13 million) from Enron, Agence France-Presse reported Sunday from London.
Enron executives held a number of private meetings with Prince Charles. Officials at St. James's Palace, the prince's London residence, said they had no regrets about the prince's meeting with Enron executives after the company's donation to the Prince's Trust, which provides opportunities to disadvantaged young adults. A spokeswoman for the prince said it was common practice for Charles to meet sponsors. The spokeswoman said: 'The Prince's Trust receives donations from a large number of corporations, and Enron is one of a number of these donors. It is very normal practice for the prince to meet executives to thank them.'
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