Andrew Fastow

Andrew Fastow was born December 22, 1961, and he was CFO of Houston-based Enron Corporation until the SEC began investigating the company in 2001. Andrew Fastow was instrumental in the intricate web of limited, Enron-controlled partnerships which were used to disguise company losses. He is currently serving a six-year sentence for charges relating to the acts mentioned above.

Andrew FastowFastow was born in DC, but grew up in New Jersey as the middle child in a Jewish family. His parents, Joan and Carl Fastow, both worked in the merchandising industry, and Andrew Fastow graduated from New Providence HS. During his high school years, he was active in student government and the school band, and he also played on the tennis team. He graduated from Tufts in 1983 with Bachelor of Arts degrees in Chinese and economics; he also met his soon-to-be wife Lea Weingarten there. They both earned MBAs from Northwestern and got jobs at Chicago's Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust.

Enron's CEO Jeffrey Skilling was so impressed with Fastow's work at Continental that he hired him on the spot. After his 1990 hiring, Fastow became Enron's CFO in 1998. As the US energy market was deregulated in the late 90s, Enron could buy energy cheaply and sell it at a floating price. Andrew Fastow knew all about the market and how to manipulate it to benefit Enron, a skill which quickly earned Skilling's admiration. Together with Kenneth Lay, Skilling always tried to come up with ways to drive Enron's stock price up, no matter how badly the company was actually performing.

Andrew Fastow created a series of companies that only did business with Enron, a move that further filled the company's coffers; it also served to hide its massive quarterly losses. The funds Fastow built were portrayed as independent, but he had a stake in all of them either indirectly or directly. Fastow made millions by bilking Enron and failing to report liabilities and cash on hand, and he convinced some of the US' largest investment banks to partake in his funds at the risk of losing future Enron business.

Fastow was so good at concealing losses that the year before Enron went bankrupt, its stock was at a record high of ninety dollars per share. It plummeted to a meager forty cents per share, but before it did, most of the company's employees were convinced to invest their retirement funds in the stock. Fastow was indicted by a grand jury in 2002 on counts including conspiracy, fraud and money laundering. In 2004, he pled guilty to securities and wire fraud, and also agreed to cooperate with authorities in exchange for a reduced sentence.