Good morning, Houston. So, did you hear about the calf that ran loose along the Gulf Freeway feeder road near Clear Lake City Boulevard yesterday? As if there aren't enough things causing traffic on our freeways, you know? The calf apparently got loose through a hole in a fence, and it wandered along the feeder for nearly an hour and a half, eluding its would-be captors until it slipped back through the hole where...
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Results tagged “andyfastow”
Good morning, Houston. It's been a long week, but fortunately, there's not much of it left. So to get things moving on toward Friday — and because we're still smarting over not knowing Texas had two Clear Lakes — we're jumping right into the news this morning. Go! >> Enron lawyers in hot water?: Two former Enron lawyers have been charged with civil violations of securities laws for — hang on to your hat...
If you like musicals of questionable quality and Enron, you're so in luck: Enron — the Musical, a locally produced stage version of the infamous corporate high jinks, is now on stage in the Heights. Seriously. Mark Fraser, a manufacturers' representative, wrote, produced and directed the show, which is based around parody lyrics set to popular show tunes. (There are 28 songs, some of which were unperformed pieces Fraser wrote for the Houston Press Club's...
Another former Enron executive learned his fate — at least his short-term fate — in court yesterday: Richard Causey, the company's ex-head accountant, was sentenced to five and a half years in prison for his role in helping maintain Enron's accounting fraud. The sentence is 18 months less than the seven-year maximum Causey agreed to serve last year when he pleaded guilty to securities fraud, but it's far less than he could have ended up with had he gone to trial and been found guilty.
If you find yourself in the mood to pay a visit to former Enron CFO Andy Fastow, looks like you'll be headed to Louisiana: The Federal Bureau or Prisons has placed Fastow in a federal prison in Oakdale, La., about 200 miles northeast of Houston, where he'll serve his six-year sentence. Oakdale isn't where Fastow had expected to end up: At his sentencing in late September, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt recommended that Fastow be...
This summer, about two months after former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling was convicted of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors in connection with the Enron collapse, U.S. District Judge Sim Lake denied Skilling's request to have his conviction overturned. But never say Skilling is a quitter: Now, he's again asking Lake to overturn his conviction, this time based on a federal appeals court ruling. The ruling in question had to do with some...
Citing Andy Fastow's cooperation with government prosecutors, the suffering his family experienced after the fall of Enron and Fastow's own penitent attitude, U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt sentenced the former Enron financial chief to six years in prison and two years' probation yesterday, just over half his maximum possible sentence of 10 years.
Former Enron CFO Andy Fastow is scheduled to be sentenced this morning, and he might have some unwanted company at his hearing: U.S. District Judge Kenneth Hoyt has invited former Enron employees to attend and talk about how Enron's collapse affected their lives. Wonder if he'll learn any new words?
When we heard that former TSU President Priscilla Slade — who was fired and indicted for allegedly spending nearly $2 million in university funds on personal expenses — was back on campus this semester teaching accounting, we can't say we were really surprised. After all, very little about TSU surprises us anymore. But we did think it was an extremely bad PR move for the troubled university, and we apparently weren't alone: Fearing Slade could...
Prosecutors in the various Enron trials have been busy this week filing rebuttals to requests from former executives including Jeff Skilling, who asked for a new trial and the chance to interview jurors who convicted him in May.
Sure, today's the day between Ken Lay's dual memorial services, and we're still a least a couple of days away from Jeff Skilling beginning his legal wranglings. But that doesn't mean we have to be without Enron news: According to the Houston Press's new HouStoned blog, former Enroner Andy Fastow was seen trading in a coupon for free guitar strings yesterday.
If you didn't see Jeff Skilling's interview with The Wall Street Journal on Saturday, here's what you missed: He thought about killing himself, became resolved to live when federal prosecutors went after him, thinks he helped convict himself and maintains he's not guilty. "I've come to the conclusion that life is better than the alternative, which was not a conclusion that was real clear to me for a period of time," Skilling told the Journal....
By now, we've all heard a lot (and a lot of the same) about yesterday's Enron verdict — and all this, of course, is only the beginning as we enter four months of speculation about Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's sentencing and the appeals the ex-execs are certain to file. But in the meantime, there's still some wrapping up to do from yesterday, beginning with Lay and Skilling's reaction to their convictions on charges of...
The prosecution began presening its closing arguments in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial yesterday, saying the former Enron executives were "masters of the cover story" who lied repeatedly to shareholders and the public. Prosecutor Katheryn Ruemmler told jurors that Lay and Skilling relied on "accounting tricks, fiction, hocus-pocus, trickery, misleading statements, half-truths, omissions and outright lies" to cheat and steal from Enron's shareholders, the true owners of the company:
Even though testimony is over in the Enron trial, the action isn't — well, depending on what you call "action," we guess. Yesterday, prosecutors asked Judge Sim Lake to keep the defense from saying that the government didn't call, or barred, certain witnesses during its closing argument next week.
The defense in the Enron trial was dealt a setback Thursday when they had to drop a plan to introduce evidence from ex-Arthur Andersen partner David Duncan. Attorneys for former Enron Chairman Ken Lay and former CEO Jeff Skilling had planned to read jurors more than an hour of testimony Duncan gave in the 2002 Andersen trial, but Judge Sim Lake said if they did that, prosecutors could bring up the fact that Duncan admitted he ordered Enron-related documents shredded two days after he learned about a federal probe into the company.
Ken Lay burst into his first day of cross-examination yesterday, angrily denying that he had tried to influence witnesses and implying that prosecutor John Hueston was one of the people Lay accused of carrying out a "character assassination" against him. Lay, the former Enron chairman, has been on the witness stand in his and ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling's trial all week; Wednesday was the first of as many as three days he'll spend being questioned by government prosecutors.
Former Enron Chairman Ken Lay continued spinning his story of innocence at his trial yesterday, maintaining that Enron's collapse was the fault of ex-CFO Andy Fastow, short sellers and the financial journalists at The Wall Street Journal. Lay stressed that be believed Enron was doing just fine, which means he couldn't possibly have been lying to people when he told them things were OK at the company even as it was sliding toward corporate doom...
Ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling kept denying accusations against him during testimony in his trial yesterday, saying he would have called the FBI if he had ever become aware of any criminal activity at Enron. Maybe. "I was aware of no illegal activity occurring at Enron Corp.," Skilling said. "I would have called the FBI. I might have a little hesitation now about doing that," he said. "You're a little angry at the government aren't you?"...
Former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling continued testifying in his and ex-Chairman Ken Lay's trial yesterday, maintaining his innocence and saying he didn't remember doing some of things he's been accused of.
All the reporters who came to town this week to watch Jeff Skilling testify in the Enron trial will have to wait: Skilling's testimony has been pushed back to at least Monday because of longer-than-expected testimony from former Enron General Counsel Jim Derrick. On Thursday, Derrick discussed ex-CEO Skilling and ex-Chairman Ken Lay's role in the company's operations, saying Skilling and Lay signed off on fudged annual and quarterly reports based on lawyers' and accountants'...
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.
Nine weeks in, and here we are in what may be the last days of the prosecution's case in the trial of ex-Enron execs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Hang in there: It's almost time for everyone to go to the lobby to get popcorn and a Coke. But first, just a bit more testimony to go.
Former Enron Treasurer Ben Glisan Jr. continued his testimony in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial yesterday, telling jurors about more cases in which the ex-Enron chairman and CEO misled investors and analysts about the company's faltering health in the months leading up to its collapse. Glisan's testimony could do a lot to undermine Lay and Skilling's defense, which is built on the notion that the company imploded because of a "run on the bank" after news came out of former CFO Andy Fastow's crooked ways.
As prosecutors head into the home stretch of their portion of the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial, they're counting on at least one star witness: Ben Glisan Jr., former Enron treasurer. Glisan worked closely with ex-Enron CFO Andy Fastow to form the side deals that both men have said were used to hide Enron's debt and artifically inflate earnings. Though jurors have already heard a good deal of testimony about that, prosecutors hope Glisan will be...
Three witnesses testified yesterday in the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling: one who criticized ex-Enron CFO Andrew Fastow's side deals, one who helped create them and one who had no idea who Fastow was. The one who criticized was Vince Kaminski, a former risk analyst at Enron who testified that ex-Enron Chairman Lay and ex-CEO Skilling ignored his concerns about side deals run by Fastow. Kaminski said his first bad reaction to the...
Paula Rieker, the former managing director of investor relations at Enron, stuck to her guns under cross-examination yesterday, maintaining that the company's management gave investors and analysts a false growth story. In her second day of testimony in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial, Rieker said she "fell into the role of being a good corporate citizen" by turning a blind eye to many Enron practices she thought were questionable — and she wasn't the only one.
Ken Lay's lawyer Mike Ramsey spent much of Monday trying to show that Lay wasn't involved in inflated earnings reports apparently designed to hide the fact that Enron was going down in flames. In the beginning of the third week of testimony in Lay and Jeff Skilling's trial, Ramsey questioned ex-Enron head of investor relations Mark Koenig about a series of drafts of Enron's second quarter 2001 earnings report in which the earnings numbers kept changing as Enron was headed for a $1.2 billion equity write-down and $680 million in quarterly losses.
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