Signaling what may be a frequent question-and-answer in the industry in the near future, Sempra Energy’s CEO was hit Thursday with questions from financial analysts on the firm’s exposure to Enron Corp. in its future business dealings as part of a third-quarter earnings conference call.

Stephen Baum said the company is monitoring very closely Enron’s unfolding financial woes and the impact on its stock price.

Baum insisted in response to questions that he is not worried at this point, using the term “attentive” to describe Sempra’s current level of interest in the still-new saga. He acknowledged that he thought other industry leaders like himself were thinking a lot about their dealings with the Houston energy giant.

“It is a question on everybody’s mind today,” Baum said in response to an analyst’s question Thursday. “We do a significant amount of business with Enron, as does most anybody in the energy trading business. Enron is a very large counterparty with us over a variety of delivery points and variety of terms (lengths of time) for both gas and electricity.

“We’re very attentive to those positions. They are all margins, and we have what we consider excellent positions in place with respect to those margins. We are monitoring that situation, but we are not overly concerned at this point.”

The size, depth and pervasiveness of Enron in the business-to-business markets for natural gas and electricity are likely to cause a repeat of similar responses in the days and weeks ahead, based on the sampling from the Sempra conference call with energy analysts with all of the major Wall Street firms.

“With Enron being a very significant player and Enron Online being a major factor in the liquidity of the market, it is a situation we are monitoring very carefully.”

Sempra’s deals with Enron are mostly “standardized,” according to Baum. Most are shorter term, but some are long-term. “All of our agreements with them go beyond simple credit agency rating questions. They are quite comprehensive in their margin requirements. The bulk of what we do with them is relatively near-term.

“I could understand concerns if we had a whole lot of business way out in time and relatively ill-liquid, or in markets where there weren’t any other easily identified counterparts. But most of our business with them in gas is quite liquid. That would be true of the electric transactions as well.

“I don’t want to leave the impression we are worried. We are not. We are attentive.”

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