Enron checks weren't in the mail

His wife recently diagnosed with cancer, and his former employer, Enron, on the ropes, Steve Pearlman decided days before Thanksgiving to cash in $280,000 worth of deferred-compensation claims to pay mounting health bills.

He filed a request, but the check never came.

Yet in the days before Enron went bankrupt, a few dozen company executives used a little-known clause in the deferred-compensation plan to retrieve at least $32 million.

"This was just another egregious thing these guys did to enrich themselves at other people's expense," Pearlman, who retired in August 2001, said of the Enron executives.

The company filed for bankruptcy Dec. 2.

Now, eight months later, those denied compensation have set their sights on Lawrence "Greg" Whalley, then the chief operating officer of the company, who they say approved the deferred-compensation payments for some but not others.

They are considering legal action against him, and also want Enron's creditors to recover the $32 million -- and possibly tens of millions more not yet publicly reported.

"We believe, given the imminent bankruptcy, all of these requests for early withdrawal were done with insider information as to the true state of affairs inside the company," said Dan Ryser, a former Enron executive heading a group of retirees and others trying to recover deferred compensation in excess of $50 million.

"To grant these early withdrawals at all was bad faith," he said. "The fact that it was done in a discriminatory fashion is worse."

A lawyer for Whalley, now managing director of UBS Warburg Energy, Enron's former commodity-trading business acquired by the Swiss bank, said the decisions to approve and deny applications were not arbitrary.