Enron Records to Stay Secret
Enron Corp., the giant Texas-based seller of electric power, won a court ruling Thursday in its quest to guarantee the secrecy of hundreds of thousands of internal business documents sought by state lawmakers.
A Senate committee investigating price gouging in California’s wholesale electricity market subpoenaed Enron’s documents in April, seeking records of electricity sales, bidding strategies, prices and out-of-state transactions.
The company refused to make the documents available without a court order protecting the confidentiality of the records. Enron sued July 11, and on Thursday Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Charles C. Kobayashi granted the company’s request for a protective order.
The judge noted in his order that Enron is a business competitor of the California Department of Water Resources, which began buying electricity on behalf of the state’s two largest utilities last January.
“Although the committee argues that the Senate is not in competition with plaintiff,” wrote Kobayashi, “the functions of the Senate and the Department of Water Resources are intertwined in so many ways that there is no doubt that not only may there be appearances of conflict, actual conflicts can arise.”
Kobayashi’s order is a reversal of an earlier, tentative ruling, in which he concluded that imposing a protective order for Enron would be an “unacceptable” intrusion by the courts into the internal operations of the Legislature.
Karen Denne, a spokeswoman for the Houston-based company, described executives as “very pleased” with the court ruling. “Turning over the documents was never the issue,” she said, “The issue was always protecting our rights.”
Enron officials will work with committee Chairman Sen. Joe Dunn (D-Santa Ana) to craft an agreement that details which documents will be reviewed by the eight lawmakers and their aides, Denne said.
Reliant Energy of Houston, another company that resisted demands for business records, on Wednesday signed a confidentiality agreement with Dunn’s committee and will begin bringing 250,000 documents to a depository in Sacramento, said Reliant spokesman Marty Wilson.
Dunn said other companies have begun to deliver documents to Sacramento, but not all are fully complying with subpoenas.
“There are some major holes that have to be plugged by the market participants,” he said.
On July 21, the Senate Select Committee to Investigate Price Manipulation of the Wholesale Energy Market voted to recommend that Enron be cited for contempt for not turning over its documents.
The full Senate has yet to vote on that recommendation.
The committee, which the Senate created in March, has focused its investigation on the private companies that purchased power plants after California moved to deregulate its electricity market in 1996.
