Andrew Stuart Fastow was born on December 22,1961 and is an American convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy.
23 Facts About Andrew Fastow
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Andrew Fastow was sentenced to a six-year prison sentence and ultimately served five years for convictions related to these acts.
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Andrew Fastow's wife, Lea Weingarten worked at Enron, where she was an assistant treasurer; she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud, money laundering conspiracy and filing fraudulent income tax returns, and was sentenced to 12 months in prison despite a plea bargain which proposed she serve five months in jail, and 5 months in home-detention.
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Andrew Fastow was born in Washington, DC He grew up in New Providence, New Jersey, the son of middle class Jewish parents, Carl and Joan Andrew Fastow, who worked in retail and merchandising.
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Andrew Fastow graduated from New Providence High School, where he took part in student government, played on the tennis team, and played in the school band.
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Andrew Fastow was the sole student representative on the New Jersey State Board of Education.
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Andrew Fastow was named the chief financial officer at Enron in 1998.
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Andrew Fastow was familiar with the market and knowledgeable in how to play it in Enron's favor.
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Andrew Fastow designed a complex web of companies that solely did business with Enron, with the dual purpose of raising money for the company, and hiding its massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets.
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Yet, Andrew Fastow himself had a personal financial stake in these funds, either directly or through partners amongst them Michael Kopper.
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Andrew Fastow pressured some of the largest investment banks in the United States, such as Merrill Lynch, Citibank, and others to invest in his funds, threatening to cause them to lose Enron's future business if they did not.
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Andrew Fastow was officially placed on leave of absence, though the board subsequently determined that it had grounds to fire him for cause.
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Andrew Fastow never implemented procedures for tracking the company's cash or debt maturities.
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On October 31,2002, Andrew Fastow was indicted by a federal grand jury in Houston, Texas, on 78 counts, including fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy.
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Andrew Fastow agreed to become an informant and cooperate with federal authorities in the prosecutions of other former Enron executives in order to receive a reduced sentence.
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US District Judge Ken Hoyt believed Andrew Fastow deserved leniency for his cooperation with the prosecution in several civil and criminal trials involving former Enron employees.
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Hoyt recommended that Andrew Fastow's sentence be served at the low-security Federal Correctional Institution in Bastrop, Texas.
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Andrew Fastow was incarcerated at the Federal Prison Camp near Pollock, Louisiana.
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On May 18,2011, Andrew Fastow was released to a Houston halfway house for the remainder of his sentence.
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In March 2012, Andrew Fastow spoke on ethics to students at the University of Colorado Boulder Leeds School of Business.
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In June 2013, Andrew Fastow addressed more than 2,000 anti-fraud professionals at the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners' 24th Annual ACFE Global Fraud Conference.
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Originally, Andrew Fastow connected with KeenCorp when the company was beta testing its software using a digital database of Enron emails.
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In 2003, Fastow was a prominent figure in 24 Days: How Two Wall Street Journal Reporters Uncovered the Lies that Destroyed Faith in Corporate America by the reporters who had broken some of the key stories in the saga, Rebecca Smith and John R Emshwiller.