Bush 'not told' about Enron calls for help

Two members of US President George W Bush’s Cabinet said they never considered intervening in Enron’s spiral toward bankruptcy, nor did they inform the president of requests for help from the fallen energy giant.

‘‘Companies come and go. It’s ... part of the genius of capitalism,’’ said US Treasury Secretary Paul O’Neill, when asked yesterday if he was surprised at the sudden collapse of Enron.

The company’s failure has left the one-time energy trading behemoth’s stock virtually worthless and thousands of workers’ pension funds in disarray.

Enron is under criminal investigation by the US Justice Department for possibly defrauding investors and other questionable financial dealings. Early last year, the company had a market value of more than 40 billion dollars (€44.7bn).

Last autumn, a month before Enron declared bankruptcy, Mr O’Neill received two telephone calls from Enron’s chief executive, Kenneth Lay. Mr Lay also called US Commerce Secretary Don Evans at the time, reaching out for help to harness the energy company’s financial slide.

Mr O’Neill’s view of Enron’s collapse was characterised as ‘‘cold-blooded’’ and reflective of ‘‘the 18th century, but not the 21st century’’ by Senator Joseph Lieberman, the Connecticut Democrat whose Committee on Governmental Affairs is leading Senate investigations into the Enron debacle.

Separately, Mr Lieberman said that an internal memo of the accounting firm Arthur Andersen LLP on October 12 directing that all but basic Enron working papers be destroyed ‘‘raises very serious questions about whether obstruction of justice occurred’’.

Arthur Andersen this past week revealed that Enron documents had been destroyed.

But Mr Lieberman said most troubling was that the memo, disclosed in a report in Time magazine, ‘‘was specifically about Enron’’ and not a general directive to clean out files. Congressional investigators want to find out why the accounting firm did not raise flags about Enron’s business practices.

In a statement yesterday, Arthur Andersen acknowledged ‘‘there were internal communications that raise questions’’ about the handling of Enron documents and that the company ‘‘is committed to getting the facts and taking appropriate actions in the Enron matter’’.