Just after Enron’s Skilling and Lay are found guilty, a paper in Alberta, Canada, accuses the company of using Alberta as a testing ground for the shenanigans that created havoc in California’s energy market.

It’s been shown that Enron grossly inflated power prices in our province. Apparently this ploy was given the code name, Project Stanley, derived from the name of our top hockey trophy.
Although a probe into Enron by Canada’s Competition Bureau in 2000 found no fault with the corporation, new evidence has reportedly surfaced, showing that there was bragging within its walls about how it had artificially driven up electricity costs in Alberta.

Meanwhile, The Economist reports,

A court in Seoul sentenced Kim Woo-choong, the former boss of Daewoo Group, to ten years in prison and ordered him to forfeit 21 trillion won ($22 billion) for his part in South Korea’s biggest corporate scandal. Mr Kim, who founded the chaebol in 1967, was found guilty of fraud and embezzlement. Daewoo collapsed in 1999 with debts of $80 billion.

Daewoo was once the most prominent of Korea’s industrial giants.

Meanwhile, a Hong Kong newspaper offers a general challenge to the long-held culture of family controlled business in Hong Kong and China:

Overdone patronage begets corruption, begets poor business culture, economic waste, social dysfunction. Getting rid of the patronage system has clear benefits for all and managerialism can in some cases undermine the worst aspects of the family-run model. But, like all coins, this one can be flipped. On the other side are the lessons learnt from the US shareholder model which provide specific warnings.

But the paper warns that the Enron verdict proves the corporate model favored in America…

can be just as arrogant and irresponsible as the most parochial family business. The bottom line is that the shareholder model as practiced in the United States is no bulwark to an elitist, irresponsible and corrupted cabal of managers ascending to a position of omnipotence and over-riding due process, ignoring the law, and marginalizing the standards of ethical business practice.

Meanwhile, an Australian blogger reports on a telecommunications stock so shaky after corporate scandals that shareholders tried to unload their stock on eBay!

As scandal after corporate scandal was revealed, all leading straight to the CEO’s large, but mostly unused desk, calls for his head were answered with his sacking. Used to years of bad results the shareholders – by now nearly 70% of all Australians – welcomed the news, but when he was awarded a $50 million payout, it was the final straw.

And one final meanwhile, here at home, wrangling continues over whether the FBI had the right to raid the office of a sitting Congressman accused in a bribery investigation. Frist says the FBI was justified; Hastert and DeLay say they overstepped. And just to show that the GOP doesn’t have a lock on ethical failure, the representative in question is William Jefferson, Democrat of Louisiana.

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I promised on May 24 I’d post the results of my press release offering to comment on the Enron verdict. And being a man of honor who writes about ethics, I’m keeping that promise.

Results were less than stellar. An email drop to some 700 outlets resulted in *one* radio interview–admittedly, nationally syndicated and for a full hour. PR Web claims 36,997 people saw the press release (which means they saw at least the headline) and 398 media outlets picked it up but none used it. This is about half the number of page views of my previous two releases posted there, but both of those have been up quite a bit longer.

But here’s the really astonishing thing: not only did my carefully crafted press release (vetted with a PR expert before it went out) fall flat, it seems that almost no one was looking for comments on this big, big story.

Watching Google-flagged alerts for business ethics and related topics in the days following the verdict, I found only one case of a reporter turning to expert sources to comment on the case: the South Bend, Indiana paper, interviewing two professors from Notre Dame and another local university.

There were quite a number of reporters who made their own comments, all of them roundly critical of Lay and Skilling. But nobody was talking to experts.

Strange!

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After six years of Bush appointees who either had no qualifications or who strongly backed various immoral and heartless positions, it’s nice to see an environmentalist and someone who seems to pay attention to ethics nominated for Secretary of the Treasury: Henry “Hank” Paulson. There’s a nice profile of him in the UK paper, The Telegraph–one of several I’ve read that all seem to agree–at least on casual glance, he appears to be a good guy.

Lord knows, we need a few of those!

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A sad day: The Supreme Court overturned its previous rulings and decided that managers can “discipline” and even terminate government whistleblowers. Whistleblowers in both government and business play a key role in keeping folks honest.

But this court seems set on a path of helping both the government and corporate sectors hide their misdeeds and mistakes.

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How small-minded and unethical they get! the Washington Post, which offers several articles on the incident, and found these examples:

“People in Washington are morally repugnant, cheating, shifty human beings.” is softened to “I learned in Washington that there is an ‘overclass’ in this country stocked with cheating, shifty human beings that’s just as morally repugnant as our ‘underclass.’ ”

Leaving aside for a moment the question about whether you want your president’s domestic policy advisor to think that the poor are morally repugnant–he altered this quote while leaving the name of the New Times reporter on the article!

Helen Thomas was all over White House press secretary Tony Snow about the content of this quote and what kind of man Zinsmeister must be–but it wasn’t reported that she addressed the issue of changing the remarks.

On Iraq…

“To say nothing of whether it was executed well or not, but it’s brave and admirable.” The altered copy deleted any hint of presidential criticism, saying only, “It’s a brave and admirable attempt to improve the world.”

Zinsmeister says he did it to increase the accuracy of the quotes and protect the reporter, Justin Park, from embarrassment. But given the very happy thank-you note he sent to Park immediately after the piece ran, this is highly dubious.

I begin to wonder if there is anyone in the high levels of the Bush administration who actually understands ethics. Note to the administration: chutzpah is not a substitute for ethics.

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