Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche

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Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche was famous as the head of the Enron International division of Enron. She later was promoted to Vice-Chairman of Enron, but left the company after a power struggle with CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

Mark was born Rebecca Sue Pulliam in Kirksville, Missouri. She attended William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri until she transferred to Baylor University, a baptist school in Waco, Texas. She received a BA in psychology from Baylor in 1976 but did not find an internship working with juvenile deliquents fulfilling. She went back to school and got an MA in international management, also from Baylor, in 1977. She moved to Houston, Texas where she got a job in Banking and married Thomas Mark, also a Baylor grad. The two had identical twin boys, Robert Wellington Mark and Thomas Jared Mark. After a divorce, Mark attended Harvard Business School with the twins in tow. Mark worked for First City National Bank in Houston, and then an energy company called Continental Resources, which through a series of mergers and acquisitions became part of Enron.

During her early years with the company, Mark attended Harvard business school and graduated with an MBA.

[edit] At Enron

At Enron, Mark became head of Enron Development in 1991, and Enron International in 1996. While head of Enron Development and Enron International, Mark made several deals which turned out to be expensive failures. Enron spent $95 million for a 50% share of a barge-mounted power plant off Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. Unfortunately, the prevailing winds blew soot from the plant onto a local hotel, which sued, and blew garbage floating in the harbor into the intake valves of the plant, making operation difficult. Enron lost almost all of its investment. Other Enron personnel criticized Mark's use of chartered jets and other outlays that drove up Enron's expenses. Mark and other executives were paid in accordance with the estimated value of a deal at the time the deal was done, and consequently faced no incentive to not make a deal and no responsibility to insure the deal was profitable.

Enron would suffer even greater losses from another one of Mark's ventures: the Dabhol power plant in India. Enron and the Maharashtra State Electricity Board of India agreed in December 1993 to build a power plant capable of producing 2,015 MW of power. The cost was estimated at $2.8 billion, and the MSEB guaranteed to buy 90% of the power produced by the plant. Problems with financing immediately arose, and in 1995 a Hindu nationalist party which opposed the plant won elections in Maharashtra. Allegations of bribery and human-rights abuses (never proven) against Enron led to riots and the cancellation of the plant in August 1995. Mark and Enron re-negotiated with the local government and struck a new bargain in Feburary, 1996, but the project fell further behind schedule and costs soared to $3 billion. Eventually, after Mark had left Enron International, the plant was shut down when the MSEB proved unable to afford the power. Enron spent $900M on Dabhol and lost most of it. (Four years after Enron's bankruptcy, in 2005, an Indian company was set up to revive the moribund Dahbol facility.

In 1998, Mark was forced out of her post at Enron International by CEO Jeff Skilling, who had been her rival for some time. However, Mark convinced the Enron board to authorize expansion into a new business: water. Later in 1998, Enron bought a British water utility called Wessex, which was renamed Azurix.

[edit] After Enron

Today, Mark sits on the Board of a California based company called Water Health International. She is busy raising her twins, who are enrolled in college, one at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN and one at Davidson College in Davidson, NC. After her remarriage to Michael Jusbasche, the two adopted a two year old boy, Andrew Mark Jusbasche, from Kazakhstan. She also owns and operates cattle ranches in New Mexico and Colorado.

[edit] References

• Eichenwald, Kurt. Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story. 2005, Broadway, 768 pages. A history of Enron.
• McLean, Bethany, and Peter Elkind. The Smartest Guys in the Room: The Amazing Rise and Scandalous Fall of Enron. 2003, Penguin, 464 pages.