Results tagged “lorensteffy”

. Here's the item from the NY Post:

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....

Another week, another witness: Sometime early this week — maybe today — ex-Enron head of investor relations Mark Koenig's cross-examination will finally end and another former exec will take the stand in the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Rice, the former head of Enron Broadband Services, confessed to securities fraud in a 2004 plea agreement; last year, he testified that Skilling helped prepare a fraudulent report to analysts in 2000. Rice said the purpose of that false report was to make Enron Broadband Services look better than it was — and indeed, the company's stock price jumped 25 percent the day the report was given. But employees have testified that Enron Broadband Services never really got off the ground and had disappeared by mid-2001, a few months before Enron went bankrupt.

A comment from Ken Lay's attorney, Mike Ramsey, during yesterday's opening statements in the Enron trial has drawn the wrath of our hard-working, plain-spoken neighbors to the north. (We mean the folks in Oklahoma, not Huntsville.) In talking about Lay's responsibility (or not) for Enron's collapse, Ramsey told jurors:

Things unfolded pretty much the way we expected in the first day of the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial: The prosecutor accused the ex-Enron bigwigs of lying to cover up the energy company's faltering finances, leading to artificially high credit ratings and stock prices. And the attorneys for Lay and Skilling said Enron was a swell company and there wasn't anything to worry about. The opening statements seem to have set the course for the rest of the trial: The prosecutors will try to prove Lay and Skilling knew things were going wrong and tried to cover it up, and the defense will try to prove that someone else — anyone but Lay and Skilling — brought the company down. Ho-hum.

Add Ken Lay to your list of things to be thankful for this holiday season. Remember how he put Houston on the corporate scandal map? How he dutifully sacrificed some of his homes and cars to show that he's just like you and me? And yesterday, Lay saved us from the horrors of a potentially Enron-free holiday season with a highly entertaining luncheon speech.