Professor Stephen V. Arbogast
Stephen Arbogast served from 1997-2004 as the Treasurer of Exxon Chemical and ExxonMobil Chemical Company. His Exxon career spanned 32 years and included assignments as Finance Manager of Esso Brasileira, Treasurer of Exxon Capital Corporation and Finance Director of Esso Standard Thailand. While Treasurer of Chemicals, Mr. Arbogast was responsible for the financing of Exxon’s $40 billion worldwide chemical business. In that capacity he also served on joint venture boards with Exxon partners in Saudi Arabia, Australia and the United States. Over the course of his career, Mr. Arbogast led or participated in more than $4 billion in capital market and project financing.
Currently serving as an Executive Professor of Finance at the C.T. Bauer College of Business, Professor Arbogast’s teaching career has focused on International Finance, Project Finance and Business Ethics. In that capacity he has authored over 70 case studies which are core teaching materials for his courses. These cases include many transactions he led or participated in during his Exxon career. Many of these cases are publicly available on the Bauer College Case Study website, www.bauerenergycases.com.
Professor Arbogast has taught in graduate MBA programs since 1987. His initial teaching was at Fordham University’s Graduate School of Business in New York. Later he also taught in Rice University Executive MBA program. He has been teaching at University of Houston since 1995. In 2008 he was awarded the Bauer College Payne Teaching Excellence Award.
Professor Arbogast is the author of Resisting Corporate Corruption. This book offers case studies and essays examining the causes of unethical corporate behavior and the options available to employees for resisting such activities. A first edition, published in 2008, contained seventeen cases covering Enron from early days until bankruptcy in 2001. A 2nd edition, published in February 2013, adds thirteen case studies on the financial crisis. These new cases examine the ethical dilemmas at Countrywide, Fannie Mae, Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, AIG, Lehman Brothers, Bear Stearns and the rating agencies. Professor Arbogast has also authored numerous articles on the energy industry. His most recent publications are Project Financing & Political Risk Mitigation: The Singular Case of the Chad-Cameroon Pipeline, and Benefit Sharing in Papua New Guinea, New Model to Tame the Resource Curse? Both articles appeared in the University of Texas Law School’s Journal of Oil, Gas and Energy Law.
Since 2008, Professor Arbogast has been a member of the National Renewable Fuels Laboratory (NREL) Biofuels Technical Review Panel. From 2008-2010 he was Principal Investigator on a study for NREL entitled Preferred Paths for Commercializing Pyrolysis Oil at Conventional Refineries.
Courses
- International Finance
- Ethics and Finance
- Tactics and Techniques of Project Financing
- Project Finance
Resisting Corporate Corruption
Resisting Corporate Corruption: Cases in Practical Ethics From Enron: Through The Financial Crisis’s seeks to enhance the teaching of business ethics by adding challenging, real world case studies to the conceptual/legal course work found in graduate schools. After completing these case studies, students should possess a “practical toolkit” that better enables them to follow their moral compass. The book offers 25 case studies that cover a full range of business practice, controls and ethics issues. The cases are framed to instruct students in early identification of ethics issues. They then concentrate on the tactics and communications skills needed to work such problems effectively within corporate organizations. Several cases present executives embedding ethical approaches inside alternative business strategies, redirecting pressures from the boss to less vulnerable 3rd parties, and using the firm’s controls structure to counteract corrupt practices. Other cases examine the circumstances faced by whistleblowers, along with the enhanced legal protections they now enjoy. The book’s first fourteen cases examine Enron’s crossing of various ethical lines from 1987-2001. Eleven new cases present key financial crisis moments at Countrywide, Fannie Mae, Citibank, Goldman Sachs and PriceWaterhouseCoopers. Interpretive essays discuss the nature of sound financial controls systems, the lessons of Enron, and the extent to which the financial crisis shows Enron’s issues to be unresolved.
Read More in the Resisting Corporate Corruption Information Document
