Word: enronization
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...protege, Jeffrey Skilling, 52, who himself faces 185 years for his 19 out of 28 guilty counts - including conspiracy, securities and wire fraud. ?It was a moral victory. Now we hope to get them an economic victory,? said Steve Berman, one of the attorneys representing pensioners ruined by Enron?s demise. In addition to $7.2 billion wrung out of banks like JPMorgan Chase and Citigroup in securities fraud litigation, employees are still waiting to get $260 million for lost benefits...
...thought the nearly five-year Enron saga has now come to an end, with both men set for sentencing on Sept. 11, you may be as off base as the company's financial statements. Attorneys for Lay and Skilling vow to appeal, and there is precedent - all the way to the Supreme Court - to attack a white-collar fraud conviction based on the fine points of the kind of jury instructions given by Judge Simeon Lake. "A 'willful blindness' instruction is a very good ground [for appeal]," says Houston defense attorney Joel Androphy. Willful blindness, which Judge Lake specifically cited...
...Enron's former accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, as well as former Wall Street trader Frank Quattrone, have successfully appealed jury instructions based on the notion of willful blindness. When Quattrone's conviction was overturned two months ago, Skilling attorney Daniel Petrocelli told TIME, "I think it's a reminder of how dangerous it is that prosecutors can overreact in putting businesses on trial." In Andersen's case, the U.S. Supreme Court voided a witness-tampering conviction of the accounting firm by ruling that the trial's jury was wrongly told it could convict the firm for shredding documents during...
...Many legal experts say that Skilling actually has a better chance than Lay for a successful appeal on the issue of willful blindness. The government never argued that Skilling made a conscious decision to ignore wrongdoing at Enron; Lay, on the other hand, had been warned by whistleblower Sherron Watkins of problems in the firm's accounting. The jurors apparently felt that Lay did not respond sufficiently to Watkins memo. "If he had done it, he would have walked today," Androphy says...
...Through 16 weeks of testimony, the government argued that the Enron case was about the lies Lay and Skilling told and the choices they made. Defense attorneys countered that neither executive did anything wrong or illegal: their company failed, they insisted, but failure is not a crime. Defense attorney Petrocelli argued that the proceedings felt more like a civil case, with the standards being used to warrant a guilty verdict lower than they are in a criminal trial. The jurors, eight women and four men, clearly disagreed. "It's a tremendous victory for the government - justice is served," says former...