Word: enronizing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...conspiracy stoically Thursday, sitting with his family, not with his attorneys. His wife, Linda, dabbed her eyes and hugged her husband while daughter Elizabeth Vittor, an attorney herself, sobbed so much her body shook. All the emotion of the moment was understandable. The 64-year-old founder of Enron, the high-flying energy company that once fancied itself as a trader of everything from water to wine, now faces the prospect of 45 years in prison - in other words, the rest of his life. Before leaving the U.S. District Courthouse after the verdict, he had to surrender his passport...
...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...
...Hovering over the entire saga is the question of whether it's such a good idea now to have an economic chair named after Ken Lay, given Enron?s spectacular collapse. Members of the alumni board have bandied about the question of retracting Lay's name. Although discussions with Lay are ongoing, the university is required by its agreement to honor the name. Lay's family has a longtime connnection with Missouri: his late mother worked at the university bookstore while his father, a Baptist preacher, had strong ties to the community in Columbia. "It's not the university...