Enron like Nortel?

On the weekend I watched the documentary: Enron - The Smartest Guys in The Room. I highly recommend taking a look at this film. I found the directors commentary to be very enlightening as well and I am going to read the book as well. What I found to be the most disturbing about this story was that the banks and the auditing firm were in on the shady dealings. I had always been of the opinion that outside auditors / accountants were supposed to pick up on bad accounting, oh how wrong I was.

The other thing that struck me about this movie was how much the Enron story reminded me of Nortel. When I worked at Nortel I was struck by how badly managed the company was and was not at all suprised that the stock took a nose dive. What does surprise me, is that even after the Enron scandal no one seemed to really question the management of Nortel. Those guys got to walk away with millions of dollars as well (in benefits, severence, etc), yet stockholders were losing money.

I don't pretend to understand the stock market, etc, but it does strike me as odd that Martha Stewart goes to jail for insider trading, but no one questions when a CEO cashes in his stock and then the company goes under.