Houston – Enron Corp. founder Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling used “hocus-pocus” to cover up a massive fraud that brought down what was once the seventh-largest company in the U.S., a federal prosecutor said Monday.
Lay and Skilling committed crimes “through accounting tricks, fiction, hocus-pocus, trickery, misleading statements, half-truths, omissions and outright lies,” Kathryn Ruemmler said in closing arguments. “Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling are still clinging to the cover stories.”
Ruemmler, pacing before the jury box as the eight-woman, four-man panel listened intently, said Lay and Skilling “lied over and over and over again” and “bent rules, pushed rules and then pushed over the line” in the years before Enron sought bankruptcy protection in December 2001.
Jurors will hear from the defense today.
