After four years, Enron's Lay, Skilling to face jury
Thursday 26 January 2006, 12:24pm EST
By Matt Daily
HOUSTON, Jan 26 (Reuters) - Four years after the dramatic demise of Enron Corp., former chiefs Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling will enter a federal courtroom in Houston on Monday to face charges linking them to one of the biggest business disasters in U.S. history.
The case against Lay, 63, and Skilling, 52, hinges on whether the two executives, who once enthralled Wall Street by creating a company that became the nation's seventh largest, were aware of Enron's financial shell game that pumped up earnings while hiding billions of dollars in debt.
The Enron Task Force, a special unit created by the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate wrongdoing at the Houston-based company, will parade several former Enron executives who have struck plea agreements in front of jurors to try to tie Lay and Skilling to criminal acts of fraud and conspiracy.
The government's case got a boost last month when Enron's former chief accountant, Richard Causey, who was due to go on trial with Lay and Skilling, struck a deal that will send him to prison for seven years and likely put him in the witness stand.
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http://today.reuters.com/business/newsarticle.aspx?type=tnBusinessNews&storyID=nN26134282~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~US:Big Test Looms for Prosecutors at Enron Trial
by Kurt Eichenwald, The New York Times
January 26th, 2006
In the court of public opinion, they were convicted long ago. But as Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, the onetime leaders of Enron, step into a court of law next week, the outcome of their fraud trial is far from certain, creating one of the most closely watched and hotly contested white-collar criminal cases ever.
On one side of the Houston federal courtroom starting Monday will be two top-flight teams of defense lawyers, who will be taking the risky approach of proclaiming many of the controversial actions of Enron and some much-criticized statements of their clients to be legal and truthful.
On the other, the prosecutors for the Justice Department's Enron Task Force, who have racked up an impressive array of guilty pleas in the case, but whose performance at trial has been decidedly less dazzling.
"For the government, if they lose the Enron case, it will be seen as a symbolic failure of their rather significant campaign against white-collar crime," said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School. "It will be seen as some evidence that some cases are too complicated to be brought into the criminal justice process."
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http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=13177
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