Enron Congressional Hearings
The Enron hearings taking place in the House and Senate in Washington are resulting in many current and former Enron and Arthur Andersen executives taking the 5th amendment to protect themselves from being prosecuted in the courts based on their congressional testimony. So far Congress is facing a wall of silence from most of the executives. How to understand what happened and pass laws (if necessary) to prevent current and future occurrances seems unlikely.
Certainly immunity for some of these executives will be necessary to get past the wall of silence. A grant of some form of immunity (there are many forms of Congressional immunity available) to low level, least culpable employees to get behing the 'wall' is one possibility. This could be used to provide insight into what was going on and who, of the executives, was responsible for what. A broader approach could be to provide immunity for all executives, get every last piece of information of what happened, and craft laws to prevent them from happening again. Of course, this would mean all executives would get off scott-free with any ill-gotten gains due to their immunity protection.
Immunity for all involved would get to the bottom of what was happening, but would not be acceptable to most Americans. Immunity to a few low level Enron and Arthur Andersen employees is preferrable so that those that attempted to profit from manipulation of the Enron books and partnerships can be uncovered and prosecuted in the courts.
02/07/02 ( 384 )
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