I forgot about Jeff Skilling. . . Sorry about that. Except for the conspiracy charge, those were insider trading charges, brought by the SEC, not the Special Prosecutors task force. It was the conspiracy charge that was reversed by the Supreme Court. Do you seriously believe that a Three Judge Panel of a subordinate court can OVERRULE a decision vacating a conviction by the US Supreme Court? When the Supreme Court makes a decision, it's final.
None of those were counts that had anything to do with the actual failure of Enron, except the false statements to auditors. Which was part of Arthur Anderson's defense. . . that they were lied to, shown false data, by Enron officers. Yet the Prosecutors still went after AA for criminal actions on a count that simply did not exist.
The point was your statement was the Arthur Anderson was "COOKING THE BOOKS" for Enron which was a flat out FALSEHOOD.
You are the one who has played fast and loose with the facts.
You have characterized my mistake as "playing fast and loose with the facts" a FALSEHOOD, etc.
I'm not on some mission to harm the reputation of Arthur Anderson, in fact, in reading what you've posted I tend to agree that it was a huge miscarriage of justice.
I've twice admitted I made a mistake here.
It was a very poor example to choose to use to illustrate my main point which is: just because some members of a profession fail to act in accordance with the standards of that profession, we don't write the whole profession off. (Maybe sometimes we do write off whole professions?)
I grabbed onto Arthur Anderson in the Enron as an example, and mischaracterized what happened.
You made a mistake in asserting that only one person was convicted of anything related to Enron. I accept that you had simply forgotten this fact, I'm not accusing you of "playing fast and loose with the facts" and propogating "FALSEHOOD", because, people make mistakes.
As I said: you obviously have a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the details of the demise of Arthur Anderson, and strong opinions on it. I respect that. I will readily admit that my initial comment (as an aside) was based only on my recollection of the highly publicized trial, and the unprecedented "Death Penalty" given to Arthur Anderson at the time. That was all front page news, and I remember it quite well.
The years-later vindication of AA in the Supreme Court I have no recollection of.
I do remember thinking at the time that it was unprecedented to shut down an entire company for the crimes of a few (even assuming there were crimes, which of course I now know they were not).
Even if a small team did something wrong I still don't understand killing the entire company over it. And this is the part I find most puzzling: "voluntarily surrendered its licenses to practice as Certified Public Accountants in the United States" In other words, they decided to go out of business, while still fighting the charges. Why wouldn't they have fought to keep their license? You can say "partnership" but then there are lots of partnerships, including law firms and other CPA firms, and you never see them obliterated by a single crime like this.
Perhaps it was the World Comm and other cases that were looming that made the PR hurdle just to big to get over?