Enron Unplugged

The Texas Supreme Court justices’ single largest source of corporate donations has collapsed in a pile of investor fraud and deception—and some of the wreckage could end up back before the court.

To break up utility monopolies and revolutionize how electricity flows into sockets, Enron had to amass enormous influence in local, state and federal governments. In its home state, Enron wielded extraordinary clout in all three branches of government.

Texas High Court justices have taken $134,058 from Enron’s PAC and executives since 1993. During this time, Enron was a party to six petitions for review. The court accepted two of the three petitions brought by Enron (66 percent) and denied all three petitions brought by its adversaries (100 percent). This is an incredible record in a court that accepts 11 percent of all petitions.
 

In both Enron petitions that the High Court heard, the justices reversed lower appeals courts to rule in Enron’s favor. In 1996, Greg Abbott wrote a unanimous reversal of a lower court, which had ruled that Enron’s purchase of Tenneco’s interest in a gas plant violated the preferential purchase rights of the plant’s other owners (Tenneco v. Enterprise Products). This decision followed Enron v. Spring ISD, in which the court slashed $225,000 off the inventory taxes that an appeals court said Enron had to pay to the Spring school district. 

When investors learned in October that Enron lied about its finances for years, they drove the company’s stock into the ground, precipitating bankruptcy. Now Enron’s creditors, investors and employees are all filing lawsuits in state and federal courts to try to recover lost billions. Some of this wreckage eventually may fall upon Texas’ Supreme Court justices—who are more indebted to Enron than any other corporate donor. •

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