Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche
It's a modest re-entry into international business. Rebecca Mark-Jusbasche, onetime leader of Enron's highflying international division, now sits on the board of directors of a small California firm, WaterHealth International. Its water purification systems serve more than 200,000 people, mostly in the Philippines and Mexico, and it sent 50 emergency relief units to Sri Lanka following last year's deadly tsunami.
Mark-Jusbasche's career once involved jetting around Asia and South America to spearhead ambitious projects with a ferocity that earned her the nickname "Mark the Shark." She was twice named one of the most powerful women in business by Fortune magazine. The Harvard Business School grad cut a glamorous profile in her trademark spike heels and miniskirts, once appearing at an Enron annual employees' meeting astride a Harley-Davidson.
But controversy swirled around her deals, particularly the $2.9 billion Dabhol power plant, still the largest foreign investment ever in India, which collapsed amid bitter local political opposition. Mark-Jusbasche served for 22 months as head of Azurix, Enron's ill-fated venture into the private water business. After a power struggle with Jeff Skilling during his rise to chief executive, she was forced out, a year before Enron's collapse in late 2001.
Recently, Mark-Jusbasche was one of 10 former Enron officers and directors who settled a lawsuit by shareholders--she contributed $5.2 million of the $13 million settlement, a plaintiffs' attorney said. A judge earlier dismissed shareholder claims of insider trading, finding no evidence of impropriety in her $82.5 million in Enron stock sales from 1998 to 2000. Efforts to reach Mark-Jusbasche were unsuccessful, but her lawyer, Helen Foster of Austin, says that her client is now busy on her New Mexico ranch, "improving her Angus herd and raising her three sons" --twin college freshmen and a kindergartner. Foster wouldn't address it, but the Santa Fe New Mexican has reported that Mark-Jusbasche and her husband, Michael, are principal investors in the Edelweiss Lodge and Spa, a new high-end development in Taos, N.M.'s ski valley.
This story appears in the April 25, 2005 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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