Ken Lay cheats thousands; then cheats justice.

Being from Houston and knowing people who worked at Enron, I carefully followed the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Their fraud swindled thousands of people for billions of dollars. A lot of businessmen push the limits of the legal rules to get rich, but Lay and Skilling not only pushed the limits, they worked the political system to get the rules changed so that they could push the limits even further.

This is what Ken Lay was doing when he supported George W. Bush for Governor and for President, and he was a strong supporter of then Texas Senator Phil Gramm and Phil's wife, Wendy Gramm. Phil was, among other favors for Ken Lay, able to get his own wife appointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) where she arranged to loosen the regulations so that the kinds of transactions Enron conducted were no longer regulated.

A few months after that happened, Wendy left the SEC and took up residence on the Enron Board of Directors where she was on the Audit Committee. As a Ph.D. in Economics, Wendy was in the position to know how shaky the company was and had the education to understand what she knew. She quietly accepted the excessive fees she got for filling space on the Board and doing nothing while the company was lying about its revenue and hiding debt on the Financial Statements. This was just a small bit of the overall fraud Lay and Skilling were ramrodding.

Then the company collapsed in a welter of lies and rewritten financial reports that finally showed the billions of dollars trusting investors and employees had lost. When Enron collapsed, it also took the Andersen Accounting firm (one of the Big Five at the time) into the dustbin with it. After about a year of rifling through the files that had not been shredded during the collapse the federal government began to try Lay and Skilling for their fraud.

The trial took four years. The jury worked it out and declared Ken Lay guilty of fraud. Lay was waiting for sentencing when he once again cheated everyone by dying - surrounded by his unearned luxury at his vacation home in Aspen, Col. This is one of several homes he still owned in spite of his protestations that he was "Broke."

From The Age we find the legal ramifications of his death before being sentenced:

"There will be no closure on a case where more than 4000 jobs and billions of dollars in shareholder wealth, savings and retirement incomes simply vaporised. And certainly no closure on a fraud that has left the US with one of the most stringent, and vilified, corporate governance regimes in the world.

[Snip]

US legal experts have said that when a defendant who pleads not guilty dies before being sentenced, the conviction is wiped out on grounds that the defendant did not have the opportunity to appeal. Lay declared his innocence after his conviction and lawyers were reportedly taking steps to appeal."

I've spent the time waiting for the jury's decision, and hoping Lay would not skate. I was delighted that he was found guilty. Now, with Lay's death, I have been robbed! Justice has been robbed. The shit DID skate!

I know I am not the only one who feels this way - but I do feel this way and I can only imagine how others are feeling. We were all robbed of justice.

So now what happens to Jeff Skilling? He's the last hope for some - even symbolic - justice. He'd better get it!