“‘Enron is one of the great frauds in American business history,’ said James Post, a professor of management at Boston University. ‘But it is also a symbol of a particular era of management practice.’” In a strange confluence of ill omens for the current administration, a jury finds finds Enron heads Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling guilty on multiple counts of conspiracy, wire fraud, and securities fraud, with sentencing set for 9/11. For their part, Lay and Skilling immediately began talking appeal, but perhaps that’ll be unnecessary. After all, surely “Kenny-Boy” can wrangle a pardon from his boy Dubya, particularly after he spent all that time crafting Dubya’s energy policy.
Tag: Jeff Skilling
Enron’s End Run.
“Fastow, in a nervous but steady voice, spent most of his first six hours on the stand describing quid pro quo deals he arranged with Jeffrey K. Skilling, then Enron’s chief executive. He said Skilling was so obsessed with making the company look good for Wall Street that Skilling approved of sham deals that helped the company meet its earnings targets while Fastow…personally skimmed millions of dollars off the transactions.” Following last week’s damning testimony by Kevin Hannon (“They’re on to us“), former Enron Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow took the stand yesterday as part of a plea deal. The prosecution’s star witness in the Enron case, Fastow is “also prosecutors’ most personally tainted witness, a man who admitted to stealing and involving his wife in fraud and who described himself Tuesday as sometimes ‘obnoxious’ and ‘opportunistic.’” Sounds like he was in good company. Update: On Day 2, Fastow implicates Ken Lay, and the defense sharpen their knives.