Saturday, August 21, 2010
The Fleecing of Westar (and Kansas): 1, 2, 3, Part II
News from a front page article in The Kansas City Star today tells "After nearly eight years and two trials, federal prosecutors on Friday dismissed all charges against former Westar Energy executives David Wittig and Douglas Lake."
I was stunned. Holy cow. These two all but knocked down your Grandmother, raped her and stole her money and here they are, getting off, scott-free. Truly, who says crime doesn't pay?
And why do I say this? As you may have read here on an earlier post, look at just a short, abbreviated list of what these two did while at Westar, as shown by The New York Times:
“During Wittig’s brief tenure with the company he managed to extract more than $25,000,000 in compensation and benefits,” the indictment read. “During Lake’s brief tenure with the Company he managed to extract more than $7,000,000 in compensation and benefits. During this same tenure Wittig and Lake presided over a company whose stock prices went from $44.00 per share to less than $9.00 per share, whose [energy] rates soared, whose debt increased to more than $3,000,000,000, and whose future was poised on the brink of bankruptcy.”
Again, keep in mind, this is only a partial list.
So, folks, if you're a Kansas electric rate-payer or a Westar stock owner from this time frame, the fact is, you just got screwed. And you got screwed big time. For all the rest of us who are simply law-abiding citizens, well, forget about all that. Crime does pay, ladies and gentlemen. Just make sure, when you do it, you go after HUGE amounts at the top of a corporation--not that little stuff you get holding up a Quickie Mart.
Try to have a great weekend, y'all.
Link to original posts:
http://www.kansascity.com/2010/08/20/2164274/charges-against-former-westar.html
http://moravings.blogspot.com/2010/07/great-nyt-article-on-enron-of-kansas-or.html
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/22/what-happened-at-the-enron-of-kansas/?hp
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2 comments:
Just a litle FYI--
I worked at 6th and Gage at Wittig's (The old Alf Landon House, had a provate walk to the capital at one point) for 4 straight months.
WOW. There was some really cool stuff placed in that mansion. From the inside, it was pretty cool, had a basket ball court, opulnent throughout. What a driveway, and he built walls, probably should have crenelated the whole thing, it was big bucks.
Now, for the record, my taste is in my mouth, I grew up in Ruskin Heights and I gotta tell ya, when it was done, they had taken what was a "Gone With The Wind" antebellum mansion, studk 10 or 15 thousand feet off to the North for garges, basketball courts, bell tower looking thingy etc. I thought, me personally, that it looked like my dad and mom had won the lottery. There is no one I love more than my dad, but we belonged in Ruskin. It looked stupid, really.
As I understand it from the big wigs on the job (BY the way, there were protesters off and on all summer outside the property.), Wittig was given, by contract, the right to make improvements on the 3 million dollar house that he bought, and WESTAR was contraqctually oblidged to give him a 17% increase on the investment when he sold it.
So, probably no one on the board thought he would sink 12 million into a 3 mill house. You get the idea.
This is what I understood from being on the job, I in no way saw any documentation, and I was categorically a grunt there, a curious grunt.
The Wittigs were nice people on a personal level. Having interacted with his wife, I gotta tell ya, my money is that she suffered from this whole thing. She loved being who she was, and the fall must have been hard. Pain from reduced expectations is still pain.
I had a friend who was on the first jury. He told me (Now this IS categorical from the horse's mouth.) that actually Wittig did NOT break any laws and was innocent. He said there was one juror who was intractible in his hate of "Rich People" and that is why it hung.
There might be some irony there, and some poetic justice.
Just a litle FYI--
I worked at 6th and Gage at Wittig's (The old Alf Landon House, had a provate walk to the capital at one point) for 4 straight months.
WOW. There was some really cool stuff placed in that mansion. From the inside, it was pretty cool, had a basket ball court, opulnent throughout. What a driveway, and he built walls, probably should have crenelated the whole thing, it was big bucks.
Now, for the record, my taste is in my mouth, I grew up in Ruskin Heights and I gotta tell ya, when it was done, they had taken what was a "Gone With The Wind" antebellum mansion, studk 10 or 15 thousand feet off to the North for garges, basketball courts, bell tower looking thingy etc. I thought, me personally, that it looked like my dad and mom had won the lottery. There is no one I love more than my dad, but we belonged in Ruskin. It looked stupid, really.
As I understand it from the big wigs on the job (BY the way, there were protesters off and on all summer outside the property.), Wittig was given, by contract, the right to make improvements on the 3 million dollar house that he bought, and WESTAR was contraqctually oblidged to give him a 17% increase on the investment when he sold it.
So, probably no one on the board thought he would sink 12 million into a 3 mill house. You get the idea.
This is what I understood from being on the job, I in no way saw any documentation, and I was categorically a grunt there, a curious grunt.
The Wittigs were nice people on a personal level. Having interacted with his wife, I gotta tell ya, my money is that she suffered from this whole thing. She loved being who she was, and the fall must have been hard. Pain from reduced expectations is still pain.
I had a friend who was on the first jury. He told me (Now this IS categorical from the horse's mouth.) that actually Wittig did NOT break any laws and was innocent. He said there was one juror who was intractible in his hate of "Rich People" and that is why it hung.
There might be some irony there, and some poetic justice.
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