RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Ken Lay finally gets his just deserts!WHOOHOO!

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From CNN.com:
HOUSTON (CNNMoney.com) - Enron former chief executive Jeffrey Skilling and founder Kenneth Lay were found guilty Thursday of conspiracy and fraud in the granddaddy of all corporate fraud cases.

On the sixth day of deliberations, a jury of eight women and four men convicted the former executives of misleading the public about the true financial health of Enron, whose collapse in late 2001 symbolized the wave of corporate fraud that swept the United States early this decade.

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the G-man said:
No.

BTW, if you look at when most of the acts Lay was convicted of occurred, they happened before Bush took office.

In other words, they were getting away with it under a democrat administration. The were prosecuted under a republican one.

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Hey G-man, I am not saying that Bush facilitated Enron's corruption or that Democrats are morally superior to Bush or the Republicans. Back when I was a right-wing idealogue I remember the furor that occured during Clinton's final days when he pardoned several of his cronies (I think they were part of the White-Water scam).

But, it seems painfully obvious that these two "Texas" businessmen traveled in the same social ciricles, even if they weren't in kahootz. I am glad that they are being prosecuted and I don't believe that successful jurisprudence is either Blue or Red. I'm just wondering if Bush will help out his old buddy before he leaves the Oval Office or if he will allow the court's ruling to stand like he did with regards to executions as the governor of Texas?

I'm glad I've got your prediction in print... I'll be sure to re-post it in two years.

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the G-man said:
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BTW, if you look at when most of the acts Lay was convicted of occurred, they happened before Bush took office.

In other words, they were getting away with it under a democrat administration. The were prosecuted under a republican one.

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Matter-eater Man said:
Clinton vetoed legislation that helped Enron & other companies fuck America over. (Republicans with lots of help from Dems were able to override Clinton's veto) Enron/Lay greatly favored Republicans, particularly Bush, when buying influence with campaign contributions.

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Randal_Flagg said:
I've got a question: do you think Dubya will pardon ol' Kenny-Boy during his last week in office?

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Chris Oakley said:
Personally, Randal, I think the odds are better of Ann Coulter being invited to the next Kennedy family reunion.

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Alright, but I am warning you... stranger things have happened. Hell, Dubya, Coulter, and Ted Kennedy are probably all having a daisy chain send off for Kenny-Boy up at Bohemian Grove right now!

When Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron executives, are sentenced in September for their crimes, legal experts expect the stiffest prison terms permitted.

Federal guidelines provide a formula by which Judge Sim Lake – who has a reputation as an aggressive judge – will arrive at the sentences. This formula includes: the number of convictions; their central role in fraud and conspiracy; the billions of dollars lost; and the multitudes affected.

"This judge has shown a strong inclination to not just throw the book, but the entire bookcase, at the defendants,'' said Jacob Frenkel, a legal expert who has followed the trial.

Mr Lay, 64, faces up to 45 years, and Mr Skilling, 52, faces up to 185 years. Mr Frenkel has worked out an aggressive sentence, based on the guidelines, and expects they each will be sentenced to 27-34 years in prison.

However, Sheldon Zenner, a legal expert, said they could get time off for good behaviour and believed the prison conditions would not even be too bad.

"They will be going to Club-Fed,'' he joked, referring to the prison camps some liken to Club Med, the holiday camps. "You usually meet your local politician, your bank president and, nowadays, your corporate CFO there.''

This is because their crimes were not violent. The prison camps tend to be refurbished army barracks, without bars or cells. Prisoners wear casual clothes, not prison jumpers. And they are assigned light work, such as cleaning the grounds.

However, legal experts warn that where the Bureau of Prisons sends prisoners often comes down to "bed space'', and they may end up in minimum-security prison rather than "Club Fed".

Mr Zamansky, a legal expert, fully expects such a prison for the men, where they could well make license plates and perform other unskilled labour.

Either way, Mr Lay and Mr Skilling will have plenty of time to mull over what went wrong at Enron.

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the G-man said:
Sentences for Lay and Skilling likely to be drastic

When Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron executives, are sentenced in September for their crimes, legal experts expect the stiffest prison terms permitted.

Federal guidelines provide a formula by which Judge Sim Lake – who has a reputation as an aggressive judge – will arrive at the sentences. This formula includes: the number of convictions; their central role in fraud and conspiracy; the billions of dollars lost; and the multitudes affected.

"This judge has shown a strong inclination to not just throw the book, but the entire bookcase, at the defendants,'' said Jacob Frenkel, a legal expert who has followed the trial.

Mr Lay, 64, faces up to 45 years, and Mr Skilling, 52, faces up to 185 years. Mr Frenkel has worked out an aggressive sentence, based on the guidelines, and expects they each will be sentenced to 27-34 years in prison.

However, Sheldon Zenner, a legal expert, said they could get time off for good behaviour and believed the prison conditions would not even be too bad.

"They will be going to Club-Fed,'' he joked, referring to the prison camps some liken to Club Med, the holiday camps. "You usually meet your local politician, your bank president and, nowadays, your corporate CFO there.''

This is because their crimes were not violent. The prison camps tend to be refurbished army barracks, without bars or cells. Prisoners wear casual clothes, not prison jumpers. And they are assigned light work, such as cleaning the grounds.

However, legal experts warn that where the Bureau of Prisons sends prisoners often comes down to "bed space'', and they may end up in minimum-security prison rather than "Club Fed".

Mr Zamansky, a legal expert, fully expects such a prison for the men, where they could well make license plates and perform other unskilled labour.

Either way, Mr Lay and Mr Skilling will have plenty of time to mull over what went wrong at Enron.

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the G-man said:....
You know, MEM, the republicans on this board don't shy from criticizing republicans. But you regularly downplay, dismiss or distort to avoid doing the same thing towards your party. Remember that, the next time you claim we're the blind partisans.

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...As for the supposedly shocking monetary figures bandied about ("Enron gave $420,000 to the [Democratic] president's party over three years. It donated $100,000 to the president's inauguration festivities."), those numbers don't come close to matching what was reported about Enron's contributions to George W. Bush and the Republican party in The Hartford Courant:
Since 1989, the Houston-based energy broker and its employees have made more than $5.7 million in contributions to federal candidates and political parties, nearly three-quarters of it to Republicans. Enron was George W. Bush's biggest contributor in the 2000 presidential campaign.
Nor do they match what The New York Times uncovered:
Enron, Arthur Andersen and Vinson & Elkins, a Houston law firm, are among the most generous contributors to Mr. Bush's 2000 presidential campaign. Enron has given more than $700,000 to Mr. Bush since 1993; no company has given him more. In addition, Enron's chairman, Kenneth L. Lay, was one of the "pioneers," raising more than $100,000 for Mr. Bush's e-mail campaign, and he and his wife gave a total of $10,000 to Mr. Bush's Florida recount fund. Enron and Mr. Lay also contributed a total of $200,000 to Mr. Bush's inaugural festivities.

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the G-man said:
Since, as you note, there is no evidence "that Bush facilitated Enron's corruption," and given that Bush's justice department prosecuted them, I continue to find the possibility of Bush pardoning either of them exceedingly unlikely.

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Randal_Flagg said:

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Chris Oakley said:
Personally, Randal, I think the odds are better of Ann Coulter being invited to the next Kennedy family reunion.

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Alright, but I am warning you... stranger things have happened. Hell, Dubya, Coulter, and Ted Kennedy are probably all having a daisy chain send off for Kenny-Boy up at Bohemian Grove right now!

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No disrespect, Randal, but the only circumstances in which I can envision Ann Coulter being in the same room with Ted Kennedy is if she were aiming a sniper's rifle at him.

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Chris Oakley said:

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Randal_Flagg said:

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Chris Oakley said:
Personally, Randal, I think the odds are better of Ann Coulter being invited to the next Kennedy family reunion.

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Alright, but I am warning you... stranger things have happened. Hell, Dubya, Coulter, and Ted Kennedy are probably all having a daisy chain send off for Kenny-Boy up at Bohemian Grove right now!

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No disrespect, Randal, but the only circumstances in which I can envision Ann Coulter being in the same room with Ted Kennedy is if she were aiming a sniper's rifle at him.

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wannabuyamonkey said:

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Chris Oakley said:

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Randal_Flagg said:

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Chris Oakley said:
Personally, Randal, I think the odds are better of Ann Coulter being invited to the next Kennedy family reunion.

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Alright, but I am warning you... stranger things have happened. Hell, Dubya, Coulter, and Ted Kennedy are probably all having a daisy chain send off for Kenny-Boy up at Bohemian Grove right now!

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No disrespect, Randal, but the only circumstances in which I can envision Ann Coulter being in the same room with Ted Kennedy is if she were aiming a sniper's rifle at him.

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That's libel.

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wannabuyamonkey said: That's libel.

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Woah, Chief hold on there! I'm not trying to defame anyone's reputation. Hey G-Man do you do any pro-bono work?

Besides, I assumed that my reference to Bohemian Grove would automatically qualify my post as paranoid-crack-pot-conspiracy-theorist ramblings, as opposed to an assertion of fact.

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r3x29yz4a said:
Opinions can't count as libel or slander. Which is why Fox News hosts wrap their BS in "it seems to me" and "some people say."

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Randal_Flagg said:
Woah, Chief hold on there! I'm not trying to defame anyone's reputation. Hey G-Man do you do any pro-bono work?

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...The close connections between President Bush and Lay began when they both worked on the 1992 Bush père presidential reelection campaign. In fact, a long paper trail of their friendly and collaborative correspondence has been made public through Freedom of Information Act requests. “Dear Ken, one of the sad things about old friends is that they seem to be getting older — just like you!” wrote then-Texas Gov. Bush in April 1997. “Thank goodness you have such a young beautiful wife.” In Lay’s typed responses — some are handwritten — he sometimes crossed out Bush’s formal titles to scrawl a friendly “George,” emphasizing their personal history before he urged the governor to, for example, help Enron secure foreign energy contracts with regimes in Romania and Uzbekistan, or called for so-called tort reform designed to protect corporations from lawsuits.

Typical was Bush’s role in Enron lobbying of Pennsylvania’s governor to permit Enron to enter his state’s energy market. As Lay wrote in a letter dated Oct. 7, 1997: “I very much appreciated your call to Gov. Tom Ridge a few days ago. I am certain that will have a positive impact on the way he and others in Pennsylvania view our proposal.” After the Enron crash, Bush attempted to distance himself from the “Bush pioneer,” who had sent more than $2 million in Enron funds George W.’s way, as well as supplying him with the Enron company jet on at least eight occasions. “I have not met with him personally,” Bush said after the scandal broke.

What Bush left out was not only his hundreds of personal encounters with Lay before he assumed the presidency but, more important, Lay’s key role in drafting the Bush administration’s energy policy. Lay met with energy task force chairman Dick Cheney at least six times. It was Lay who submitted a key memo opposing price caps in response to the energy crisis in California that Enron had helped engineer. Lay was also instrumental in the abrupt dismissal of Curtis Hebert Jr. as Federal Energy Regulatory Commission chairman. The neutered FERC later conveniently refused California’s loud pleas for help.

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the journey from the collapse of Enron to Mr. Lay's conviction was anything but predictable. Instead, it was a long and arduous legal journey for federal prosecutors, filled with false leads and evidentiary dry holes.

The public widely perceived the criminal case against Mr. Lay to have been a "can't lose" proposition, similar to the parallel case assembled against Enron's former chief executive, Jeffrey K. Skilling. But the legal hurdles on the path to Mr. Lay's conviction were so daunting that some prosecutors privately worried that they would never even be able to charge Mr. Lay with any crimes.

"There was this public perception of Ken Lay as the mastermind, but that really didn't bear out," said Leslie R. Caldwell, who headed the task force in its first two years. "We realized very fully early on that Lay was not involved in the decision-making day to day and that we weren't going to be able to prove his involvement in the structuring of transactions like LJM."

Prosecutors speculated that they could build a fraud case against Enron by proving that the company publicly portrayed itself as strong and vibrant, even though executives like Mr. Lay knew that it was rotting from the inside.

"It was definitely a shift in investigative strategy," Ms. Caldwell said of the meeting. "We had to focus on the big picture, and not just the individual transactions. But it was just a seed that pointed to a direction. It wasn't as if that immediately led us to decide what we were going to charge."

Enron's former treasurer, Ben F. Glisan Jr., appeared before a grand jury in Houston and gave prosecutors a little gift. In addition to providing evidence against Mr. Skilling, he testified that Mr. Lay knew he was lying in 2001 when he provided upbeat statements about Enron's prospects even as the company was plummeting toward bankruptcy proceedings.

"That was a real turning point for a whole variety of reasons," said Andrew Weissmann, a former task force director who questioned Mr. Glisan that day. "Ben Glisan clearly pointed the way to the Lay case. I was relieved."

Other dominoes continued to fall. An F.B.I. agent assembled evidence that Mr. Lay lied to accountants to help Enron avoid a huge write-down. New witnesses, meanwhile, told the grand jury fresh details about other possible lies by Mr. Lay.

They also focused on statements that Mr. Lay made in an online forum in which he told Enron employees that he was buying falling Enron stock without mentioning the far greater number of shares he was selling to the company itself. That omission, prosecutors believed, amounted to securities fraud.

Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling were both convicted of multiple fraud and conspiracy charges. The jury found that both men carried out their crimes by misleading investors and employees about Enron's performance.

In short, they decided that Mr. Lay was a liar.

Enron Corp. founder and former CEO Kenneth Lay, who was convicted for his role in one of the largest instances of business fraud in U.S. history, died of a heart attack on Wednesday in Colorado. He was 64.

"Apparently, his heart simply gave out," said Pastor Steve Wende of Houston's First United Methodist Church. Lay, who lived in Houston, frequently vacationed in Colorado.

Lay was awaiting an Oct. 23 sentencing for his convictions in the Enron collapse and was expected to face a lengthy prison term.

Prosecutors in Lay's trial declined comment Wednesday, both on his unexpected death and what may become of the government's effort to seek a $43.5 million judgment from Lay that they say he pocketed as part of the conspiracy. Lay's death will not affect their case against Skilling.

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the G-man said:
Enron Founder Ken Lay Dies of Heart Attack

This may create an interesting legal issue. In certain situations, where a defendant dies before his sentence, his attorneys can ask the court to vacate his conviction, on the theory that no one is "finally convicted" until sentence is imposed.

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the G-man said:
Enron Founder Ken Lay Dies of Heart Attack

This may create an interesting legal issue. In certain situations, where a defendant dies before his sentence, his attorneys can ask the court to vacate his conviction, on the theory that no one is "finally convicted" until sentence is imposed.

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the G-man said:
The Prosecutors most likely cannot [put a lien on his estate] because, as noted above, the death before sentencing probably voided the conviction. Without a conviction there is no way for the government to impose a lien for restitution.

However, as noted in the above article, claims filed by shareholders against Lay and other senior Enron executives in a civil case can still proceed to trial. The question will be whether or not, by the time the trial is concluded, there is an estate left upon which to lay claim.

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