Subject: The Cendant Scandal

I don't know if anyone remembers, but before Enron, there was the Cendant Scandal in 1998-1999. Cendant, a huge multinational company which was the result of a 1997 merger by CUC International Inc. (A membership based consumer services conglomerate huge in the travel, shopping, dining and home improvement businesses; It also had a computer and video game division which included Sierra On-line Inc., Blizzard Entertainment and Davidson & Associates) and HFS (which was the parent company of hotel franchises such as Ramada, the Days Inn, Holiday Inn., etc). While the company was one of the largest in the world, it turned out that the guys at the CUC end had been ''cooking the books''--inflating their income--for years--and it resulted in what was the largest corporate scandal in history. It resulted in thousands of losses, particularly at the game companies Sierra and Blizzard, whose names had been used by CUC in many of it's dirty dealings. As a result, the company Sierra (makers of games such as King's Quest, Space Quest, SWAT, Caesar, etc) and Davidson & Associates (which owned Blizzard and made mostly children's games) began to collapse.