Lou Pai

Pai and Fewell together operated Canaan Ranch, located near metropolitan Houston, where they raised and trained dressage horses. They later moved from Sugar Land, Texas, to Middleburg, Virginia, and opened a second Canaan Ranch there, but as of 2014, it is up for sale. More recently, Pai and his family have moved to Wellington, Florida.

On July 30, 2008, Pai agreed to resolve civil insider trading charges against him with an out-of-court settlement of $31.5 million, including $1.5 million in civil fines and $30 million in restitution, to be deposited into a fund for shareholders harmed by Enron's bankruptcy. He continues to neither admit nor deny the Securities and Exchange Commission claims that he sold millions of shares of Enron stock based on non-public information about the company's financial problems. It is one of the largest settlements in the history of the SEC's enforcement program dealing with an individual for alleged insider trading. As part of the settlement, Pai was also barred from serving as an officer or director of a public company for five years.

Accounts of the Enron scandal have frequently portrayed him as a mysterious figure; a former Enron employee, interviewed in the 2005 documentary film Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, referred to Pai as "the invisible CEO".

Between May 18 and June 7, 2001, Pai sold 338,897 shares of Enron stock and exercised Enron stock options that put another 572,818 shares on the open market. At the time, the price averaged $53.78 per share. This early sell-off of Enron stock had the benefit of shielding Pai from the insider trading charges leveled against other Enron executives who had also secretly sold-off large amounts of stock before the company's ruinous finances were publicly known.

Pai joined Enron in 1987, when it was just a regional energy supplier. He became one of (eventual) CEO Jeffrey Skilling's top lieutenants, primarily tasked with detailing and implementing Skilling's vision of transforming Enron into a de facto energy commodities-trading firm. During his Enron career, Skilling put Pai in charge of multiple Enron subsidiaries. Pai was CEO of the EES (Enron Energy Services) subsidiary from March 1997 until May 2001. The reasons for his resignation from Enron remain shrouded in mystery.

Pai was born in Nanjing, China and came to the United States at the age of two. Pai obtained both his B.S. and M.S. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park, where his father, Shih-I Pai, was an aeronautics professor. Pai worked for the federal government in the 1970s before joining Enron.

Lou Lung Pai (Chinese: 白露龍; pinyin: Bái Lòulóng) (born 23 June 1947) is a Chinese-American businessman and former Enron executive. He was CEO of Enron Energy Services from March 1997 until January 2001 and CEO of Enron Xcelerator, a venture capital division of Enron, from February 2001 until June 2001. He left Enron with over $250 million. Pai was the second-largest land owner in Colorado after he purchased the 77,500-acre (314 km) Taylor Ranch for $23 million in 1999, though he sold the property in June 2004 for $60 million.