Enron began operations about 18 years ago, in July 1985. Huston Natural Gas merged with InterNorth, a natural gas company. After the merger they decided to come up with a new name, Enron. Enron grew in that 18-year span to become one of America's largest companies. A man named Kenneth Lay, an energy economist, became CEO of Enron. He was an optimistic man and was very keen to do things in a new way. He turned Enron into a huge corporation and in just 9 years Enron became the largest distributor of electricity in the United States. Just 6 years later, in the summer of 2000, the stock reached an all-time high and sold for more than $80 per share. Enron was doing great and everything you could see was perfect, but that was the problem, it was what you couldn't see that was about to put Enron in the record books. Enron was in trouble because of something that almost every major corporation during this time was guilty of. They inflated their profits. Things didn't seem to be going well for them at the end of 2001, so they made a joint move and restated their profits for the last four years. If this had worked the way they did, they could have gotten away with hiding millions of dollars in debt. This fully admitted that it had inflated its profits by hiding debt in confusing partner agreements. Enron couldn't service its debt, so it did the only thing left to do, it filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. This became one of the largest companies to file for bankruptcy in US history. In just three months their share price dropped from $95 to less than $1. No recent event has brought their problems to light. They were going through a difficult time, so they decided to reestablish their funds in the last four years. When they did this, they showed huge differences in money compared to what they had published and how they had reformulated it. So much so that they were eventually forced to declare bankruptcy. They brought the problem on themselves. If someone hadn't become suspicious after Skilling resigned, he probably could have gotten away with it for a few more years. But I think they would have been caught sooner or later. Many companies have experienced and are still experiencing what Enron went through.