Enron’s Overseas Boondoggle

WASHINGTON —  With operations in 20 countries, Enron Corp. set out in the early 1990s to become an international energy trailblazer, with grandiose projects and huge U.S. government-backed investments in places no other company would go.

Enron launched bold projects in poverty-ravaged countries such as Nigeria and Nicaragua. It set up huge barges--with names like Esperanza, Margarita and El Enron--in ports around the world to generate power for energy-starved cities.

Enron cut through a Brazilian tropical forest--ranked one of the hemisphere’s most endangered ecosystems--to lay a gas pipeline. It broke ground on Poland’s first privately owned power plant and braved India’s turbulent politics to build a $3-billion plant.

After Enron went into bankruptcy protection, U.S.-backed lenders and disappointed foreign governments are surveying the damage caused by the company’s international designs. As facts emerge about the foreign ventures, it appears that Enron did not earn a dime from the projects, but it used some of them in creative accounting schemes that disguised the company’s true financial picture, documents and interviews show.

Last week, the Overseas Private Investment Corp., which backed many of the projects, moved to stem its $1-billion Enron exposure by canceling $590 million in loans to the company, once one of its largest clients. Enron had missed deadlines for OPIC requirements in financing projects in Brazil, an OPIC spokesman said. OPIC’s decision shifted more of the burden for the troubled projects from the U.S. government to Enron’s creditors, lenders and partners.

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System Encouraged Executives to Gamble

Like other parts of Enron’s vast operation, its international division was fueled by intense internal competition and huge financial incentives. Executives pocketed multimillion-dollar bonuses for signing international deals under a structure that based their rewards on the long-term estimated value of projects rather than their actual returns. The system encouraged executives to gamble without regard to risk, said Louis Wells, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied Enron’s overseas investments.

Enron’s international investment totaled more than $7 billion, including more than $3 billion in Latin America, $1 billion in India and $2.9 billion to develop a British water-supply and waste-treatment company.

It enlisted U.S. ambassadors and secretaries of State, Commerce and Energy to buttonhole foreign officials. Enron cultivated international political connections, recruiting former government officials and relatives of heads of state as investors and lobbyists.

In reports to investors, the company played down or obscured what analysts and others saw as inevitable losses. But in an interview with academic researchers nine months ago, Jeffrey K. Skilling, who then was chief operating officer, conceded that Enron “had not earned compensatory rates of return” on investments in overseas power plants, waterworks and pipelines. Skilling said the projects had fueled an “acrimonious debate” among executives about the wisdom of its heavy foreign investments.

An internal investigation released this month showed that two foreign projects, in Brazil and Poland, were entangled in Enron’s off-the-books partnerships, accounting devices controlled by then-Chief Financial Officer Andrew S. Fastow that shielded huge debts from investors.

The report showed that Enron engaged in an unusual transaction to add $65 million to the revenue of the Brazilian pipeline project before it had even been completed. The Polish plant was briefly sold to an insider partnership and sold back to Enron a few months later. Those arrangements allowed Enron to present a more optimistic report to investors.

Other partnerships at the center of the Enron investigation also were involved, an Enron spokesman said. The Whitewing partnership had interests in the Trakya power plant in Turkey and Elektro, a power distributor in Brazil. It also owned a controlling interest in Promigas, a natural gas pipeline operator in Colombia, and the Sarlux power plant in Italy.

Another partnership, called Ponderosa, had interests in the CEG, CEGRIO and Gaspart gas-distribution companies in Brazil, the Centragas distribution system in Colombia and the TGS gas transportation company in Argentina.

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U.S. Supplied Billions for Enron Expansion

The U.S. government has been a major backer of Enron’s overseas expansion. Since 1992, OPIC provided about $1.7billion for Enron’s foreign deals and promised $500million more for projects that didn’t go forward. The Export-Import Bank put about $700 million into Enron’s foreign ventures. Both agencies provide financing and political-risk insurance for foreign projects undertaken by U.S. companies.

Enron already has filed a $200-million claim with OPIC in connection with its troubled power plant in Dabhol, India, which is up for sale but considered unlikely to recover Enron’s full investment.

OPIC spokesman Larry Spinelli said Enron was notified Wednesday that the agency would not proceed with processing $590 million in loans. Asked if they could be resurrected as Enron attempts to restructure under bankruptcy protection, Spinelli said, “Not under these circumstances. This is over now.” Enron spokesmen declined to discuss the foreign projects in detail but acknowledged trouble at certain projects.

“There might have been some where we paid too much,” Enron spokesman John Ambler said. “And there are others where there have been operational difficulties. But a large number of them are still good.”