She read the accounts, and doggedly ignored the spin. She assessed Enron not on the basis of its ongoing success, not on the basis of the conspicuous wealth and prestige of its executive officers, not on the basis of its glossy brochures and glitzy premises - but purely and simply on the numbers. McLean's triumph lay in her forensic rigour. When the truth came out, Lord Wakeham surrendered this sinecure and one other: chairman of the Press Complaints Commission. Sadly, though, there is no mention of one British participant in this sorry story: Tory peer John Wakeham, who in the 1990s pulled down a juicy £80,000 per year serving as non-executive director for Enron and brushed aside warnings that his employer was dodgy. Her story is brilliantly told in this cracking documentary directed by Alex Gibney, based on the subsequent book that McLean co-wrote about the Enron scandal. Thanks to McLean, the public discovered that Enron was a fraud, inflated by mendacious accounting, the manipulation of public utilities and Maxwell-style raiding of pension funds. It was the first jab in an investigation revealing the biggest and most grotesque scam of modern times. She is the magnificently persistent reporter who in 2001, in the face of sneering from the American business boys' club, wrote an article in Fortune magazine suggesting that Enron, the gigantic US energy corporation, was "overvalued". T here should be a gold statue of Bethany McLean outside every journalism school in the world.
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