Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling were found guilty last week of charges related to their leadership roles in Enron. However, there is one person who is breathing a sigh of relief that he did not get his dream job: Rich Kinder. In 1996, Kinder believed that he would become CEO of Enron to Ken Lay's Chairman of the Board. That was not to be: Skilling was chosen and Kinder went on to form Kinder Morgan with Bill Morgan. Kinder Morgan, now a family of companies including the publicly-traded Kinder Morgan, Inc., had a similar business plan to the 1996 Enron and bought Enron Liquids Pipeline from Enron, the assets of which are held in the publicly-traded limited partnership Kinder Morgan Energy Partners, L.P. Today, Kinder Morgan, Inc. announced that it would "go private" in a leveraged buyout led by Rich Kinder and other investors, such as Goldman Sachs, the Carlyle Group, Bill Morgan, and Houston businessman and KM director Fayez Sarofim.
Of course, all the negotiations and discussions leading to Kinder Morgan deciding to go private at this time began some time ago, so that announcement less than a week after the guilty verdicts may be purely coincidental. However, now may not be the time to want to be chance whether investors and regulators see you as a company with a vision or a company with a scheme.
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1. Posted by Tom Kirkendall on May 30, 2006 @ 6:57 | Permalink
I don't know about that, Christine. The timing could be an effective strategy to dampen the market for competing offers! ;^)
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