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by James V. Grimaldi
Washington Post Staff Writer, May 6, 2002; Page A01 Of Enron Corp.'s many political maneuvers in Washington before its fall into bankruptcy, winning the promise of federal financing for a 390-mile pipeline from Bolivia to Brazil through the Chiquitano Dry Tropical Forest may have the most enduring consequences. With that pledge of $200 million in U.S. financing, Enron built the natural-gas pipeline directly through South America's largest remaining undeveloped swath of dry tropical forest, a region rich with endangered wildlife and plants. The pipeline, completed late last year, and its service roads have opened the forest to the kind of damage environmental groups had predicted: Poachers travel service roads to log old-growth trees. Hunters prey on wild game and cattle graze illegally. An abandoned gold mine reopened and its workers camp along the pipeline right-of-way. Perhaps most stunning, however, to many federal employees who reviewed the project, was how Enron persuaded a U.S. agency, the Overseas Private Investment Corp., to support the pipeline, even though the agency was charged with protecting sensitive forests such as the Chiquitano. "It shouldn't have been done," said Mike Colby, a former Treasury Department senior environmental adviser and now a corporate consultant. "The forest had already been declared by the World Bank . . . one of the two most valuable forests in Latin America. And OPIC chose to ignore that. They were so driven to reach these unsupportable conclusions because they wanted to finance the project at all costs." The story of the Cuiabá Integrated Energy Project offers a case study of a symbiotic relationship. While Enron was seeking billions in OPIC loans and insurance, the company lobbied Congress to save OPIC from extinction. Enron needed OPIC's backing for Cuiabá because no commercial bank would finance it. Germany offered $165 million in loans, but the support was contingent on OPIC's pledge. "We had to have that OPIC board vote before we could actually start the construction," Enron Vice President John Hardy Jr. said recently. Enron also included Cuiabá in an transaction to inflate company revenue and hide debts and losses and enrich several top Enron executives. Enron bookkeepers recorded a $65 million profit from the project before the pipeline had delivered any gas. But the true numbers, not known until now, show that Cuiabá came in three years late and more than 50 percent over budget, ballooning to $750 million from $475 million. After triumphing in one of OPIC's most contentious financing battles, Enron ultimately lost its loan money in February after missing key funding deadlines. OPIC is now reviewing its handling of Cuiabá and has asked the U.S. Justice Department to examine all of its dealings with Enron for possible fraud. Separately, OPIC's new president, Peter Watson, wants to overhaul how the agency decides which forests are protected under agency rules, spokesman Larry Spinelli said. Bold Plan, Sensitive Area The story begins in the 15 million-acre Chiquitano forest, one of the World Wildlife Fund's 200 most endangered eco-regions. It is the habitat of the endangered marsh deer, hyacinth macaw, maned wolf, jaguar and ocelot. A 1,900-mile pipeline built by Enron, Royal Dutch/Shell Group and Bolivian partners ran along the Chiquitano's southern border, linking gas fields in Santa Cruz, Bolivia, with a distribution center in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Enron and Shell wanted to build a spur off the existing pipeline to pump Bolivian natural gas to Enron's 480-megawatt, gas-fired power plant in Cuiabá, Brazil, to help feed that country's skyrocketing energy demand. The idea was bold and controversial: Enron's plan would bisect the Chiquitano, a prospect that outraged environmentalists. Enron's plans got a stunned response from U.S. government officials as well. George Taylor, head of the environment team in Bolivia for the U.S. Agency for International Development, asked Enron's Hardy why the company was cutting through forest rather than running a longer line around the sensitive area. He said Hardy told him Enron wanted to move quickly and keep costs competitive "so the engineers took out their rulers and traced two possible routes that were straight lines." Hardy said recently Enron selected the most direct route. By late 1998, environmental opposition mounted. The World Wildlife Fund, Friends of the Earth and Amazon Watch recommended that Enron change its plan to circumvent the forest. But Enron refused. The company argued that rerouting would lengthen the pipeline by 70 percent and cost more than $100 million. It stressed that the plan complied with OPIC's strict policy on development in protected forests. To resolve the conflict, OPIC's longtime environmental director, Harvey Himberg, dispatched two specialists to survey the area in January 1999. OPIC reviewers Nancy Dean and Angela Miller flew over the pipeline route and were shocked to see little development and a dense canopy of trees. Later, when Dean met Taylor, "She just gasped and said, there was no way in hell they [OPIC] could fund this," Taylor said. But after the team returned, Himberg took a novel approach. He decided OPIC would judge the project's environmental impact not on the forest as a whole but on a more limited area -- the land immediately adjacent to the pipeline right-of-way. On that basis, he determined the project would not be barred under OPIC's forest restrictions. Soon afterward, both Dean and Miller left OPIC, and colleagues say they were uneasy about OPIC's handling of the matter. Contacted by The Washington Post, both declined to comment in detail, saying they left for better jobs. During the process, Enron's Hardy enjoyed extraordinary access to Himberg, sources said. The Enron lobbyist visited OPIC so often that workers joked that he had moved into Himberg's office, located on a secure floor in OPIC's New York Avenue NW offices in Washington, according to a former OPIC employee. Hardy had no apologies: "It was an important project and these were critical issues." Himberg said he met Hardy periodically but, "I didn't have a lot of time to spend with John Hardy." Longtime OPIC employees also believed that George Muñoz, OPIC's president and chief executive, took an unusual interest in Cuiabá and exerted intense pressure on Himberg. "I never saw anything during my time with Muñoz that rivaled his determination with Cuiabá," said a former senior official, who requested anonymity. "His commitment and his determination to stick with Cuiabá so stands out, it is so striking." Muñoz said he did nothing improper and saw his role as trying to mitigate any damage to the forest. Muñoz said he simply followed Himberg's lead. "Never, ever, ever would I have overridden Harvey Himberg," Muñoz said. "Enron had no special influence with OPIC." Asked if he felt pressured by Muñoz, Himberg said, "I really can't comment on that." Some inside OPIC saw Muñoz as an ambitious political appointee trying to make a mark. A prominent Chicago Democrat, he had met then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton while serving on the city's school board. A business graduate of the University of Texas, he began cultivating Houston-based Enron as soon as he arrived at OPIC in 1997. Two months after taking charge, Muñoz invited Enron then-chief executive Kenneth L. Lay to speak to an OPIC employee retreat about "the kind of investment support you will need from international agencies like OPIC," according to the invitation letter. In the Muñoz era, Enron increasingly turned to OPIC to fund risky projects in developing countries. With $3 billion in OPIC loan pledges, Enron was the agency's largest customer in the 1990s. At the same time, Enron battled a congressional coalition seeking to cut "corporate welfare" by killing OPIC during its 1997 and 1999 reauthorization votes. In 1999, Hardy, Enron's Cuiabá lobbyist, led industry groups working Congress to save OPIC. Lay wrote every member of Congress in April seeking votes for OPIC reauthorization. The effort paid off, and, to celebrate, Enron executives joined trade groups to fete OPIC employees at a posh holiday party. As Enron's reliance on federal agencies grew during the Clinton administration, the company boosted its soft money donations to Democrats. From 1998 to 2000, as Enron pursued OPIC loans, the company's increased such donations by a factor of five, to $533,000. A Nuanced Definition When Cuiabá came up for a vote by OPIC's 15-member board, there was no clear consensus. Seven members came from government agencies, and three important ones --Undersecretary of Treasury Timothy Geithner, Undersecretary of State Stuart Eizenstat and U.S. AID Administrator J. Brian Atwood -- were deeply skeptical. A single "no" vote from any one of them could sway the rest of the board. The three members, and particularly their environmental advisers, believed that the project violated OPIC environmental policy. The policy had been shaped after President Bill Clinton in 1997 at the United Nations General Assembly "Earth Summit" prohibited U.S. lending agencies, including OPIC, from supporting "infrastructure projects located in primary tropical forests and other ecologically fragile areas." Two years after Clinton's mandate, OPIC enacted its definition of a "primary forest" as a "relatively intact forest that has been essentially unmodified by human activity for the past 60 to 80 years." It was characterized by an abundance of mature trees and limited "artisanal," or subsistence, levels of hunting, fishing, logging and migratory farming. The nuances of OPIC's definition fueled the Cuiabá battle. Enron presented evidence of human activity that it said exceeded the "artisanal" level. Environmental groups countered that Enron was exaggerating. The groups also harbored suspicions that Enron had helped to write the definition, which was drafted in 1998, to exempt the Chiquitano from OPIC's forest-protection policy. Enron's Hardy was among those who lobbied OPIC on its environmental policies. Hardy and Himberg deny that Enron had a hand in writing the policy. Over the past three years, Himberg and OPIC repeatedly have attributed the agency's forest definition to similar language used by the World Bank. But when The Post pointed out significant differences in the two, Himberg revised his statements. He said OPIC in 1999 adopted a definition from the Forest Stewardship Council, a sustainable forestry group. Hank Cauley, the council's U.S. director, said the group dropped that definition as antiquated in January 1999. "You have to think about conserving the forest as a whole," Cauley said. "They have interpreted that too narrowly." The World Bank's then-chief biodiversity adviser also found fault with OPIC's definition. Thomas E. Lovejoy, now the president of the Heinz Center for Science, Economics and the Environment, said he told OPIC its definition was so narrow that no forest in the world would fall under its protection. He said he told OPIC that the World Bank would not have funded Cuiabá. OPIC board members contacted by The Post said they were unaware of Lovejoy's views. Instead, they said that Himberg simply told them OPIC's definition was in keeping with the World Bank's. Deal for Conservationists OPIC board members were so concerned about Cuiabá that their vote was postponed in March 1999 and again at a June 2, 1999, meeting. Muñoz took the unusual step of scheduling another board meeting for June 15 to vote on Cuiabá. Unhappy with the delays, Enron pressed for a decision. Meanwhile, Muñoz had been pushing Enron to reconcile with the environmental groups. The company began negotiations with five groups, including the WWF, but the groups were adamantly opposed to the construction. They wanted the pipeline rerouted. As a fallback, they insisted that the company put up $50 million to reimburse indigenous groups and protect the rest of the forest. Two days before the June 15 OPIC vote, Enron agreed to invest $10 million in a conservation fund over five years and find $10 million in matching funds. The environmentalists accepted the deal. The agreement proved important as OPIC's board began deliberations. Enron touted the agreement as a sign that environmental groups had been appeased. But the WWF now says that, despite the agreement, they never abandoned their steadfast opposition to the project. They say they were simply used and outsmarted and that Enron distorted their position. "It was very Machiavellian," said Patricia Caffrey, the WWF's lead negotiator whom Enron officials had dubbed "the dragon lady." "We were clear that we had never approved a pipeline," said former WWF vice president Twig Johnson, now a project director at the National Academies of Science. We were misrepresented in their lobbying efforts." At the June 15 meeting, OPIC's Himberg presented his case that Chiquitano was not a primary forest. The environmental specialists from U.S. AID and Treasury were appalled. "It was really extraordinary. Tim Geithner kept calling me up to sit behind him to explain," Colby said. "I remember saying, 'Tim, he's lying. Tim, he's lying.' " But others were swayed. "Harvey Himberg recommended approval," Muñoz said. "He recommended it after making sure extra steps were taken that we go as far as we could to make this project as environmentally sound as possible." Undersecretary of State Eizenstat remembers it as a compromise. Atwood said he believed Enron was ready to secure private financing that would have offered no environmental protections. With OPIC involvement, he said, the environmental groups won a conservation fund and other concessions. The project passed unanimously, with certain conditions attached. Enron was required to limit forest access, monitor the environment, slightly alter the pipeline route, though it would still bisect the forest, and create the $20 million conservation fund. "The [environmental groups] were not happy," Muñoz said. "But it was a deal that was struck that was a good one and had some protective measures on it. And we carried a big stick." U.S. Investigates Deal Just after OPIC's vote, Cuiabá became enmeshed in byzantine financial program that now is under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department. In September 1999, Enron sold a 13 percent stake in the pipeline for $11.3 million to LJM1, a partnership controlled by Enron's then-chief financial officer, Andrew S. Fastow. Enron then booked a $65 million profit for a 20-year gas-supply contract with its own power plant. Enron contended that its sale of 13 percent of the project relieved it of majority control and of the obligation to include Cuiabá's debts on its balance sheet. It also allowed Enron's accountants to count projected revenues from the gas-supply contract as profits in the year's final two earnings reports. In Enron's heyday, the quarterly earning reports fueled Enron's ballooning stock price. The Cuiabá revenues were a significant chunk, almost 15 percent, of Enron's late 1999 earnings reports. "If they didn't show up with these sort of schemes every quarter, they would lose their step-ladder earnings," analyst Robert McCullough said. But behind the rosy numbers, the Cuiabá project was in serious trouble. During 2000, environmental problems caused delays and cost overruns that required millions in additional funding, according to internal Enron board minutes. The delays in OPIC approval meant construction could not begin until Bolivia's rainy season. Then, when crews crossed into Brazil, they ran into a series of ridges over caves with endangered bats, and authorities required special procedures. These problems likely caused Cuiabá's value to decline sharply, according to an internal report produced for Enron's board after its bankruptcy filing. Nevertheless, Enron bought back LJM1's interest in Cuiabá on Aug. 15, 2000, for $14.4 million, a $2.1 million gain for Fastow and his fellow investors. Enron's internal investigators concluded that Cuiabá and other similar deals "call into question the legitimacy of the sales themselves and the manner in which Enron accounted for the transactions." The repurchase of Cuiabá at a price above its value gave the appearance that Enron had always intended to buy back Cuiabá. The conservation fund quickly ran into trouble. Within a month of the OPIC board vote, the WWF backed out, saying indigenous groups had been left out and Enron and Shell were insisting on fund board seats. The pipeline was completed last year and is delivering natural gas to the Brazil power plant. The company continues to run both the pipeline and the power plant, and its stake in Cuiabá was included as an essential ingredient of Enron's bankruptcy reorganization plan unveiled Friday. In September, OPIC had sent a six-page letter detailing how Enron had failed to accomplish some of the environmental measures included in the deal. In February, OPIC canceled Enron's $200 million loan before the funds were released; Enron could not produce financial documents because of contract disputes with Brazilian authorities. "I feel just as frustrated as anyone else that Enron was not able to comply with any of these things," said Muñoz, who is now in private practice in Arlington. "But OPIC did not pay one red cent for this project." Staff researcher Lucy Shackelford contributed to this report. Source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A37365-2002May5.html
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