Results tagged “markkoenig”

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 CEO Jeff Skilling began the rather tough task of convincing the jurors that he's just like you and me — er, like them — during his first day of testimony in his and ex-Enron Chairman Ken Lay's trial yesterday. Skilling, you'll remember, was known for the grace and charm with which he treated people during his days at the Big E (there was that infamous conference call during which Skilling called an analyst...

Defense lawyers began trying to chip away at the prosecution's story Monday, the first day of the defense's case in the trial of former Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. The main testimony came from Joannie Williamson, a former assistant to ex-Enron Chairman Lay, ex-CEO Skilling and ex-head of investor relations Mark Koenig, who was on the witness stand for more than eight days for the prosecution. Williamson said yesterday that Koenig perjured himself when he pleaded guilty to aiding and abetting securities fraud in August 2004.

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...

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.

After a long weekend, we expect the Lay/Skilling trial-ravaganza to return with renewed vigor. Last week, things ended on an upbeat note when the third witness — yes, that's right, three whole witnesses in three weeks! — took the stand. That third witness was accountant Terry West, who started working at Enron in 1981, before it was even called Enron. West testified that her boss was told in 2000 to decrease the company's estimated earnings...

Though ex-Enron Broadband Services head Ken Rice stuck by his story of misleading company directors, employees and analysts with regard to EBS' failing corporate health Thursday, he said he doesn't remember confronting former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling about the deception. Much of Rice's third day on the stand in the trial of Ken Lay and Skilling was spent under cross-examination by Mark Holscher, one of Skilling's lawyers, who tried to undermine some of Rice's accusations about deceptive earnings reports:

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.

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.

Under cross-examination by Jeff Skilling's lawyer, ex-Enron head of investor relations Mark Koenig said Thursday that neither Skilling, the former Enron CEO, or former Enron head Ken Lay specifically told him to lie about the company's well-being. It was the fourth day of cross-examination of Koenig in the Lay/Skilling trial, and lawyer Daniel Petrocelli continued trying to make Koenig's previous testimony seem forced and unfounded.

Much of Wednesday's episode of the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial was taken up by a February 2001 webcast to Enron employees and tapes of two 2001 telephone calls, all made while the company was on its way to collapse. Local media picked up on the irony of the webcast, in which Lay and Skilling predicted Enron would be "the world's leading company" by 2006.

Defense lawyers in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial kept trying to undermine the credibility of Mark Koenig, the first government witness, Tuesday.

Former Enron investor relations head Mark Koenig went on the defense yesterday as Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's lawyers tried to attack his credibility by asking why he didn't get himself fired. Last week, Koenig testified to prosecutors that he helped artificially inflate Enron's profits to fool investors and analysts — and he said Lay and Skilling were active in that deception. Which left the natural question for the defense: Why didn't Koenig tell anyone,...

The second day of testimony in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial didn't go any better for ex-CEO Skilling than the first one did, as former investor relations head Mark Koenig continued his story of adjusted profits and inflated corporate health. Specifically, Koenig said company officials — including Skilling — didn't tell investors about $230 million in quarterly retail division losses during an April 2001 conference call, and in July 2001 he also neglected to mention Enron Energy Services' $726 million debt. Instead, he told investors things were "great" (granted, that's a relative term, but come on!).

In the first day of testimony in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial, Enron's former head of investor relations said the company's earnings were often adjusted to keep stock prices up. Mark Koenig, who worked closely with former executives Lay and Skilling, said both men were involved in financial management and that Skilling, the ex-CEO, authorized the financial deception.

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.

Houstonist didn't know if it would actually happen, but it did: By the end of a day of jury selection in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial, there was a jury selected! Eight women and four men were selected to serve on the jury, with two men and two women chosen as alternates.