What is Enron?
The Enron Corporation bought and sold infrastructure commodities, such as wholesale electricity contracts, natural gas pipelines, waste water management and power plants, to wholesale suppliers and retail customers worldwide

The company, founded in 1985, was considered a pioneer in the largely uncharted global energy markets.

By the late 1990s, Enron's reported profits came from marketing and trading future prices for energy contracts — meaning the company worked to guarantee a specific price at which gas, oil, or electricity could be supplied sometime in the future.

Enron's star rose in Wall Street due to its massive growth and stated profits, with the company often promising shareholders a 200 percent return on their investments.

By 2000, the company had expanded its operations beyond the traditional energy business, exploring ventures like online trading of energy and telecommunication commodities, providing risk-management consulting services and supplying Internet broadband services.

By the time the company went bankrupt, it employed nearly 21,000 people worldwide, boasting profits of $100 billion, and had projects in India, South America, Asia and Europe. Besides jump-starting the sagging "old economy" energy markets, Enron formulated a business strategy for the "new economy" by selling unusual “products” like protection against bad weather, broadcast slots for advertisers, and units of Internet bandwidth.

Additionally, the company's Enron Political Action Committee has been a leading corporate donor to political causes and candidates. Since the 1990 election cycle, Enron and its employees made nearly $6 million in contributions, with about 74 percent of those donations going to Republicans.

-- By Liz Harper, Online NewsHour (June 2002)