Enron's domestic-partner scam. (Finance).

In the procession of top Enron executives invoking the Fifth Amendment rather than undergo grilling by members of Congress about the Fortune 500 corporation's spectacular collapse, one company official stood out to gay men and lesbians.

According to The Washington Post, Michael J. Kopper, a former Enron executive, ran an illegal Enron subsidiary, Chewco, and later turned it over to his domestic partner, William D. Dodson, to avoid the scrutiny of federal regulators.

In selling the shell company back to Enron in March 2001, the couple netted a $10.5 million windfall on a $125,000 investment. In addition, Enron paid Kopper more than $2 million in consulting fees between 1997 and 2000 for running the company, which owned stakes in natural gas production projects.

It is not clear whether Kopper, a friend and colleague of Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling's, took advantage of the lack of legal recognition for his domestic partnership in order to hide his role in the venture, and neither Kopper nor Dodson returned calls from The Advocate. The couple's role in the debacle was first detailed in a 27-page report compiled by an investigating committee appointed by Enron's board of directors.

"On the one hand, if all the published accounts are accurate, it's refreshing to see that Enron made it possible for openly gay executives to succeed," said Bob Witeck, of Witeck-Combs Communications, a public relations and business consulting firm in Washington, D.C. "On the other hand, Enron's own self-dealing culture made it just as possible for an openly gay executive to go up in flames, along with his domestic partner."

Indeed, the Human Rights Campaign, a gay advocacy group, rates Enron a 6 on a scale of 10 for the quality of its workplace environment. Not only does the Houston-based company include sexual orientation in its nondiscrimination policy, but it also provides insurance benefits to employees' same-sex partners.

To Witeck and many other gay men and lesbians, the gay-friendly policies appear to be the only ethical aspect of a corporation that bilked investors out of billions and wiped out its employees' pension fund.

But at least some antigay activists have found a way to blame the company's demise on its personnel policies. In a January 29 column in the rightwing Charlotte [N.C.] World, editor Warren Smith complained that Enron and other Fortune 500 companies "do business in places where homosexual behavior--sodomy--is illegal. In other words, these companies have corporate [benefits and antidiscrimination] policies that condone--if not outright encourage--illegal behavior."

Smith, of course, was referring to the fact that same-sex sodomy laws are still on the books in Enron's home state of Texas and in about 15 other states. Nevertheless, most critics of the company seem more interested in Kopper's executive skills and business ethics than in his sexual orientation.

"We do not know whether [Chewco's shoddy accounting standards] resulted from bad judgment or carelessness," the internal Enron investigative report stated, "or whether it was caused by Kopper or other Enron employees putting their own interests ahead of obligations to Enron." Whatever the cause, the report concluded, "the consequences were enormous."