Corporate Emperors Still Rule, Says Enron Whistleblower

The "imperial chief executive" who treats the assets of a listed company as if they were his own is as active as ever despite attempts to clean up the corporate world, according to Sherron Watkins, who blew the whistle on her own bosses' excesses at Enron.

Too many accounting rules can still be manipulated and analysts' reports remain "broadly inadequate" for giving the real picture to investors, she argued yesterday.

Legislation such as the Sarbanes-Oxley rules in the US have improved corporate governance but behaviour "has not got much better", the former Enron vice-president said after addressing a London meeting of the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners.

It is up to institutional investors, who ultimately control most large corporations, to be more active in reining in rogue executives, she said.

"I do think that the imperial chief executive officer is not dead in America. You have a lot of CEOs acting more like dictators from resource-rich African countries treating their companies' assets as their own."

The corporate excess at companies such as Tyco seemed to show a culture where senior executives could not get enough personal reward from their companies, added Ms Watkins, who was made Time magazine's person of the year in 2002 for highlighting wrongdoing at Enron.

She joined Enron in 1993, initially working for Andrew Fastow, who managed Enron's $1bn-plus portfolio of energy investments. In August 2001 she alerted the then chief executive, Kenneth Lay, to accounting irregularities and resigned in November 2002.

Last night she described standing up against corporate excess as a "lonely road to take" and said she disliked the term whistleblower because it had a pejorative ring to it.

Other "corporate sentinels" were treated like pariahs - driven to divorce and alcoholism - and things would not change as long as bosses labelled as troublemakers those who warned of wrongdoing inside businesses.

Ms Watkins said it was symptomatic of the continuing rogue culture that a law firm recently organised a half-day seminar on whistleblowing under the title The Corporation Under Siege.

She said she did not expect to get a job in mainstream corporate life for the time being, given her history, and her earnings on the conference circuit could not last indefinitely.