Enron execs using company jets

Since Enron Corp filed the largest US bankruptcy in history last year, the company has used its two jets for eight round-trip flights to New York where the case was filed, a spokesman said.

Seven of those flights carried a total of 43 passengers to bankruptcy hearings before US Bankruptcy Judge Arthur Gonzalez in New York, spokesman Mark Palmer said yesterday.

The eighth flight this week transported family members of former Enron executive J Clifford Baxter to his funeral on Wednesday in his hometown of Amityville, New York.

Baxter, 43, was found dead in his car in an affluent Houston suburb early on January 25 of an apparent suicide. Police determined that he shot himself in the head with a .38-calibre revolver found beside him.

‘‘We have had in the past two months a total of eight round-trip flights,’’ and the one for Baxter’s family was for personal reasons, Palmer said.

Some friends of the Baxter family joined that flight, including one Enron employee who was close to the family, Palmer said.

Baxter resigned as Enron’s vice chairman in May last year after working for the company for a decade. He was named in an August letter written by another executive, Sherron Watkins, as complaining to former chief executive Jeff Skilling about accounting practices that helped fuel the fallen energy giant’s collapse last year.

Palmer said before Enron filed bankruptcy on December 2, the company owned two jets and leased three. After the filing, the leases were cancelled.

Of the remaining two jets, ‘‘both are for sale and have been for sale. They haven’t sold because the market for airplanes is terrible,’’ Palmer said.

Deborah DeFforge, laid off from Enron on December 3 after working for the company for five years, said the continued use of jets is hard to swallow when former workers are living on unemployment benefits and trying to find jobs in a tight economy.

‘‘I think just using the plane is obscene, but for that family it’s not obscene,’’ she said. ‘‘My heart goes out to that family.’’