Trial, Day 33: Who the hell do we think you are?

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's lawyers continued hammering at key points of the prosecution's case in the trial of the two ex-Enron executives yesterday, focusing on former CFO Andy Fastow's alleged attempt to get preferential treatment for his LJM side companies.

Mark Metts, a former corporate development executive at Enron, said Fastow tried to get inside information so he could use LJM2 to counter-bid during Enron's planned sale of its wind farms to UBS in April 2001. Metts said he told Fastow "he would have to play just like everybody else," which prompted an angry phone call from the former CFO. "He spent the entire 10 minutes — the portions I wasn't talking — screaming into the phone," Metts said. "He asked, 'Who the hell did I think I was?'" and then said he'd tell Skilling about the incident. (Houstonist assumes Fastow wasn't asking Metts who the hell Fastow thought Fastow was — see, he was ... oh, never mind.) Metts said Skilling agreed that the only way LJM could get involved in the bidding process was to go by the rules. Enron didn't sell the wind farm to UBS or LJM, and Metts ended up being demoted and put to work under Fastow about a month after their conversation regarding the deal. Who the hell did he think he was, indeed.

Another witness Tuesday was Wade Cline, who worked in India as an Enron executive and is now Enron's general counsel. Cline talked about Enron's Dabhol power plant, one of the international assets prosecutors singled out while making their case. Cline said the plant, which was shut down after the Indian government stopped paying for power, still had value and that Enron probably could have earned back its $1.2 billion investment in the plant if it had been allowed to work through its contracts in litigation. Instead, Enron only recovered about $20 million because of its bankruptcy.

Two former human resources employees, Sarah Davis and Marla Barnard, testified about the "redepolyment" of about 250 Enron Broadband Services employees when the division was cut back early in 2001, saying the redeployments weren't meant to hide anything. Prosecution witness Ken Rice, an ex-EBS executive, said the redeployments were actually layoffs.

In other trial news, the defense decided not to swap tables with the prosecution despite fighting early in the trial for the right to change tables. In January, Lay's lawyer Mike Ramsey said the defense team had a constitutional right to sit at the table closest to the jury, and Judge Sim Lake said the side presenting its case would be allowed to sit nearest jurors. But the prosecution apparently has so much electronic equipment at its table that it decided not to move after all — but it still knows that it can.