Results tagged “brucecollins”

Yesterday it was the defense's turn to make its final arguments in the Enron trial — and in six hours of often loud speechifying, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's lawyers reasserted their claim that the two former Enron executives had nothing to do with the company's collapse.

Prosecutors rested their case against former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling yesterday, asking Judge Sim Lake to drop three charges against Skilling and one against Lay. The dropped charges against Skilling concern a 2000 deal, Project Greyhawk, which prosecutors say the ex-Enron CEO and others created to take advantage of an anticipated jump in Enron's stock price. But to prosecute those allegations, the government would have had to get into the business of...

Yesterday in the Lay/Skilling trial, defense lawyers hit witness Kevin Hannon right where it hurt: in the funny bone. Hannon, the former CEO of Enron Broadband Services, testified Thursday that ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling told executives during a May 2001 meeting, "They're on to us," referring to a Wall Street investment firm questioning Enron's earnings. On Monday, Skilling lawyer Mark Holscher asked Hannon whether Skilling might not have made the statement sarcastically: "Anything's possible," Hannon...

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.

Enron's former managing director of investor relations, Paula Rieker, testified Tuesday that Ken Lay just might have been one of the bad guys, alleging that she directly confronted Lay about misleading outsiders, but he continued doing so anyway. It was Rieker's first day of testimony in the trial of ex-Enron Chariman Lay and former CEO Jeff Skilling.