Enron
American energy company
Enron Corporation was an American energy, ENE on NYSE (ICE) commodities and services company based in Houston, Texas. It was led by Kenneth Lay and developed in 1985 via a merger between Houston Natural Gas and InterNorth, both relatively small regional companies at the time of the merger. Before its bankruptcy on December 2, 2001, Enron employed approximately 20,600 staff and was a major electricity, natural gas, communications, and pulp and paper company, with claimed revenues of nearly $101 billion during 2000. Fortune named Enron "America's Most Innovative Company" for six consecutive years.
At the end of 2001, it was revealed that Enron's reported financial condition was sustained by an institutionalized, systematic, and creatively planned accounting fraud, known since as the Enron scandal. Enron became synonymous with willful, institutional fraud and systemic corruption. The scandal brought into question the accounting practices and activities of many corporations in the United States and was a factor in the enactment of the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002. It affected the greater business world by causing, together with the even larger fraudulent bankruptcy of WorldCom, the dissolution of the Arthur Andersen accounting firm, which had been Enron and WorldCom's main auditor, and coconspirator in the fraud for years.
Enron filed for bankruptcy in the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York in late 2001 and selected Weil, Gotshal & Manges as its bankruptcy counsel. Enron emerged from bankruptcy in November 2004, under a court-approved plan of reorganization.
The public source identifies “Enron” as american energy company. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Enron, American and energy.
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Chronology, provenance and viewpoint should be read together before a broad social or political interpretation is accepted. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q327646. VIAF identifies the subject as 142338268. The Library of Congress control number is nr94001830. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1985, 2001, 2000 and 2002.
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This entry incorporates text from “Enron” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.