http://www.ocregister.com/news/dunn00618cci1.shtml June 18, 2002 By JOHN HOWARD The Orange County Register SACRAMENTO -- Enron Corp. turned over electronic data under subpoena to state Sen. Joe Dunn's investigative committee that are incomplete, rife with erasures and apparently altered to cloak the power merchant's activities in California, Dunn said Monday. The missing or damaged material on nine compact computer discs includes e-mails among ranking Enron executives, including former Enron President Jeffrey Skilling; encrypted memoranda, scheduling and price information, and other documents, said Dunn, D-Santa Ana. Some information sought by the committee was not provided and other, irrelevant data was duplicated. In some cases, Dunn said, a data specialist hired by the committee cracked encryption codes and passwords to obtain documents for the committee. "Of the nine CDs, there was perhaps one and a half CDs of nonduplicative information," Dunn said, "and missing were the e-mails of certain high-level Enron management folks, and documents relating to the energy crisis." The Senate Select Committee to Investigate Price Manipulation of the Wholesale Energy Market was negotiating with Enron to obtain all the documents, and the company has promised "full, unfettered access to the information," Dunn said. If that access is not forthcoming, however, the committee could consider contempt proceedings against the company, which could entail $1,000-a-day penalties. An Enron spokeswoman said the company provided all the required information to Dunn and that Enron sought to cooperate with the Senate's investigation. "We have been working with him. We have made every effort to accommodate his requests," Karen Denne said. The committee's information-technology expert hired to review Enron's electronic data is expected to testify next week, detailing allegations of alterations and deletions in the submitted material. The consultant's team cracked encrypted messages among Enron executives and found that large amounts of information were excised, said committee attorney and lead investigator Laurence Drivon. "We did not get the quantity of information we wanted. Their (Enron's) search was too restrictive in nature," Drivon said. Enron lawyer Gary Fergus of San Francisco said in an April 24 e-mail to Dunn's committee that "Enron does not believe" there was any "intentional concealment or destruction" of material on the CDs. Fergus also said Enron had seven clusters of servers to handle its Microsoft Exchange-Outlook e-mail load, plus a Lotus Domino Notes system. He said some e-mails sought by the committee may not have been found in keyword searches because individual users' mailboxes were moved between servers for "performance and load balancing reasons." "Enron fully described and disclosed the search protocol to the California Senate," Fergus added. But Dunn said the committee's data specialist found "numerous examples" in which information appeared to have been deliberately erased, and that there was little or no information submitted about the company's business practices, even though the committee's request targeted Enron's top executives. He also said the committee's expert rejected Enron's position that the company did not deliberately mishandle information. The committee declined to identify the forensics consultant or his company, citing a confidentiality agreement. Dunn also seeks voluntary testimony July 11 from H. Ross Perot, the head of Texas-based Perot Systems, and documents relating to Perot Systems' efforts to sell information about California's energy market. Dunn on Monday said he would subpoena Perot if the company didn't supply documents to the committee by this evening. Perot Systems helped set up the electronics for the state's deregulated energy trading system under a 1997 contract. - ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org To unsubscribe email majordomoat_private with 'unsubscribe isn' in the BODY of the mail.
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