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Those comments came back to haunt Lay last week in an 11-count indictment accusing him of conspiring to cook Enron's books even as he touted its tainted stock. For starters, prosecutors claim that Lay failed to mention to analysts several massive problems he knew about, including some $7 billion in hidden debts. And he neglected to tell employees that the company's liquidity hinged on an emergency billion-dollar loan Enron had just obtained by offering its precious pipelines as collateral. But one egregious comment Lay made that fateful October day could end up as his salvation. During...
Government prosecutors are patting one another on the back for finally hooking the biggest fish in an investigation into what U.S. Deputy Attorney General James Comey described last week as Enron's "spectacular fall from grace." Lay, 62, was the public face of the once stodgy pipeline firm that morphed into the seventh biggest U.S. company by trading natural gas and megawatts of power. A minister's son with a Ph.D. in economics, Lay was spared being charged with approving Enron's now famous off-the-books partnerships that hid so much debt for so long. And unlike...
...date, the task force has charged 31 defendants and netted 10 guilty pleas from former Enron employees. And Lay's indictment may not be the grand finale. Federal prosecutors made clear last week that more charges are coming. Arthur Andersen, the Big Five accounting firm convicted of obstructing justice in the Enron investigation, is now defunct, but other companies like Merrill Lynch that were involved in questionable partnerships may face further scrutiny. Enron's greatest legacy, however, is no doubt the passage of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which, among other things, requires CEOs to sign off on the veracity...
...wake of the indictments, the behavior of Enron's former management team has run the gamut from arrogant (this spring Causey asked a judge to unfreeze some of his assets to pay for a country-club membership) to paranoid (in April, Skilling got picked up by police following a drunken scuffle in which he accused fellow bar patrons of being undercover FBI agents) to surprisingly defiant. Lay launched a p.r. blitz last week, using a post-indictment press conference to express grief at his failure to save the company while angrily proclaiming his innocence. "Failure does not equate...
...ENRON AGAIN The case against former CEO Ken Lay: How much did he know about his company's book-cooking schemes...