Results tagged “mikeramsey”

Ex-Enron chief Ken Lay's lawyers took the first step toward getting his conviction vacated yesterday, filing a request with U.S. District Sim Lake that would substitute Lay's estate for Lay, who died July 5. The request would allow the estate to act on Lay's behalf, which would in turn allow the estate to move to dismiss Lay's indictment on charges of fraud and conspiracy in connection with Enron's collapse.

Details on Ken Lay's death are slowly trickling in, including early word that he did die of natural causes, according to preliminary autopsy results. That deals a blow (admittedly, a tiny one) to the conspiracy theories Houstonist has been hearing all day.

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:

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.

As the defense began presenting its case in the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling this morning, one of the key defense lawyers was missing from the courtroom. Mike Ramsey, Lay's lead attorney, was undergoing tests related to a stent that was inserted in his chest March 24. On Tuesday, Ramsey is scheduled to undergo an inasive procedure so doctors can check on the stent; a spokeswoman for Lay said he hopes to be...

Former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow wrapped up his testimony yesterday, maintaining that he and other Enron executives broke the law despite hammering by defense lawyers. It was ex-Chairman Ken Lay's lawyer Mike Ramsey's turn to cross-examine Fastow on Monday, and he repeatedly accused Fastow of exaggerating his testimony to try to make himself look better.

As we enter the seventh week of the trial of ex-Enron Chairman Ken Lay and ex-CEO Jeff Skilling, the Chronicle takes a look at some of the iffy investments Enron made before it imploded. The foreign energy deals weren't nearly as stable as Enron execs indicated, but most of them are still operational — though, as the Chronicle notes, it's not clear how well they're doing today.

Former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow delivered more goods for the prosecution during his testimony Wednesday and didn't back down from his accusations against Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling despite a full assault from Skilling's lawyer Daniel Petrocelli. In his second day of testimony in the trial of ex-Chairman Lay and ex-CEO Skilling, Fastow told jurors that Lay knowingly misled reporters and employees about the company's health.

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.

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.

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.

So the lawyers for ex-Enron bigwigs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling have been looking at questionnaires sent to potential jurors in the dynamic duo's trial on conspiracy and fraud charges in connection with Enron's collapse. Hang on to your hats, becuase what they found is a shocker: People around here really don't think much of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling.