What Happened and Why?
A look into the reasons for the downfall of Enron Corp and Parmalat Inc.

Introduction
We all know Enron to be one of the biggest and most public financial collapses in world history. Many factors, from top leadership to the lawyers who worked for Enron, to the auditors of US companies, to the outside banks that backed Enron in their investments are all to blame in some part for the failures and detriment of so many workers throughout the world. Similar to Enron is an Italian based company, Parmalat that too, had leadership and ethics issues leading to its downfall. In both of these cases, inquisitive journalism was “the cat that undid the ball of yarn” unraveling the inner workings and failures of all involved.

The Players
Ken Lay was the “Captain of the ship” for Enron since it’s beginnings. A driven and money hungry individual, he sought to advance his wealth and that of his company above all else. The exact reasons as to why are very much up for interpretation, but one thing is clear: he loved being rich. To this effect, Ken Lay enlisted the help of many other less than ethical members of the corporate world to help build and grow Enron. Andrew Fastow and Jeff Skilling were the “sidekicks” of Ken Lay and architects of many of the ways Enron “cheated” the system to get ahead and hide what was really going on.
Mr. Tanzi, CEO and founder of Parmalat, was also a captain of “an unethical ship”. He was found to have enticed investors into providing large financial backing through superfluous schemes and then quickly sent the money overseas to offshore holding accounts, while running up the company debt from large financial banks. In this case, Mr. Tanzi claimed he had no knowledge of the shell game going on with investors, nor did he know about the financial “cat and mouse” game being played with the financial auditors that