Houston – The anticipated fireworks in the Enron fraud trial quickly fizzled into slow-burning embers Tuesday.
Former chief executive Jeff Skilling spent his second day on the stand debunking – in painstaking detail – the government’s conspiracy and fraud charges against him. Under the deliberate prodding of defense attorney Daniel Petrocelli, Skilling disputed claims by his former colleagues at Enron that the company routinely fluffed up financial statements.
Skilling, who has kept his sometimes-combative demeanor in check, chafed when his attorney asked him whether Enron had propped up quarterly earnings by a few pennies to meet Wall Street expectations.
“That is absurd. It’s not true,” Skilling snapped.
Also not true, Skilling said, were statements from a long line of Enron executives turned government witnesses who have filed into court in recent weeks to testify against him.
“You’ve heard a lot of people, people you worked elbow-to-elbow with, who said you lied,” Petrocelli said. “Were they telling the truth?”
“No – they weren’t,” Skilling said.
“Did you ever have a single conversation with someone at Enron in which you said, ‘We’re not cutting it – we’ve got to break the law’?” Petrocelli asked.
“I never did that,” Skilling replied. “I don’t think I did anything remotely like that.”
As is often the case in white-collar trials, jurors will have to decide which side is more believable.
There is no paper trail directly linking Skilling or Enron founder Ken Lay, a co-defendant, to the alleged fraud at Enron. So prosecutors and defense attorneys are waging a he-said, she-said battle.
Charges against Skilling span the period from 1999 to 2001, when he resigned from Enron four months before it filed for bankruptcy protection.
The six charges against Lay focus on his actions after Skilling left Enron. Lay, 63, and Skilling, 52, face at least 25 years in prison if convicted.
