Houston – The question of whether Enron Corp. founder Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling are crooks and liars in what a prosecutor deemed a “historic case” was left in the hands of a jury Wednesday.
The panel of eight women and four men in the blockbuster fraud and conspiracy trial began deliberations with one last plea from a prosecutor to hold the defendants accountable for obfuscating the company’s financial problems in a web of lies as the government alleges.
“I’m asking you to send a message that it’s not all right. You can’t buy justice. You have to earn it,” Sean Berkowitz, director of the Justice Department’s Enron Task Force, told jurors before they retired to a secluded room to reach a verdict.
“You get the final word in this historic case,” he said. “You get to decide whether they told the truth or they told lies.”
The trial is the premier criminal case to emerge from the government’s 4 1/2-year investigation into Enron’s 2001 collapse amid one of the most sweeping corporate scandals in U.S. history.
More than $60 billion in market value, almost $2.1 billion in pension plans and 5,600 jobs were lost in its fall.
Skilling faces 28 counts of fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors, while Lay faces six counts of fraud and conspiracy. Both face lengthy prison terms if convicted on all counts.
Lay, 64, and Skilling, 52, once enjoyed reputations as business visionaries who led the transformation of a once-staid natural-gas pipeline company into an energy giant that peaked as the nation’s seventh-largest company with $100 billion in reported revenue.
The government alleges the two were so bent on maintaining Wall Street’s adoration that they lied repeatedly about Enron’s financial health when they knew accounting schemes inflated profit and hid hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and bad news.
By the fall of 2001, the alleged chicanery was crumbling, pushing Enron into bankruptcy proceedings by December.
The government, through its 25 witnesses, sought to tie Lay and Skilling to an overarching conspiracy to lie to employees and investors.
Berkowitz said neither defendant tried to ruin the company. But the fraud could survive only as long as Enron’s stock price was up, and “if they could just hold on, they felt if they could just lie a little longer and get to the next quarter and the next quarter, everything will be fine.”
