After reading the WSJ article, I think things look quite bad for Citicorp. Being possibly exposed to the claims of Enron shareholders is close to catastrophic. Those round trip phoney commodity sales to hide debt from the balance sheet have a certain noisome quality. I think this story has legs.
In the avalanche of news following the Enron collapse, the repeated calls that Enron made to the White House and Treasury Department pleading for a bailout were widely reported. Notwithstanding many Democratic insinuations that the Bush White House was a wholly owned subsidiary of "Kenny Boy" Lay's Enron, the Bush administration turned Enron down flat.
Less attention has been paid to the call that Robert Rubin made to Peter Fisher, the Treasury undersecretary who is the administration's point man on financial markets. And almost no attention has been given to the content of that call. While the call was not a crime or even a civil offense, it was in an important way the most telling event in all the recent financial fiascoes.
Rubin, secretary of the Treasury from 1995 to 1999, is no longer in government. He is a director of the Citigroup financial conglomerate. Rubin is the ne plus ultra of eminent Clintonians. Indeed, after Alan Greenspan, he is the most respected figure in international financial markets.
http://www.claremont.org/writings/020708higgins.html