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Wednesday, 10-Sep-2003
Enron ex-treasurer pleads gets five year prison term
Copyright 2003 Agence France-Presse (via ClariNet)

WASHINGTON, Sept 10, 2003 (AFP) - A US court on Wednesday sentenced former Enron Corp. treasurer Ben Glisan to five years in jail after he pleaded guilty to fraud charges at the scandal-ridden energy firm.

Glisan was the first Enron executive to go to jail. As part of a plea agreement, Glisan also agreed to forfeit 938,000 dollars to the government and not to seek a refund from the US Treasury of approximately 412,000 in income taxes.

After his release from prison, Glisan will be under supervised release for an additional three years.

The plea at a hearing in Houston, Texas, came as federal prosecutors reportedly intensified their probe and decide whether to charge two former Enron chief executives, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling.

Leslie Caldwell, the government's Enron task force chief, declined to comment on other aspects of the probe but said the plea agreement with Glisan and prison sentence "sends a strong message to other people."

Glisan pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire and securities fraud and acknowledged that he and others "conspired to falsify Enron's reported financial results, making the company appear more successful than it actually was," the Justice Department said.

He had been charged with 26 criminal counts in an indictment May 1 that also named former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow and former finance executive Dan Boyle.

Glisan acknowledged a role in in a scheme using an investment unit called LJM run by Fastow and an off-books entity called Talon to avoid reporting investment losses on its balance sheet.

Glisan admitted that he and others at Enron deliberately structured Talon in a way that appeared to comply with, but in fact violated, applicable accounting rules.

"Today's plea further demonstrates the increasingly elaborate -- and fraudulent -- accounting games used by Enron to conceal what has now become apparent: Well before its ultimate collapse in 2001, Enron was a badly failing business," said acting Assistant Attorney General Christopher Wray.

"Mr. Glisan today accepted responsibility for his part in Enron's collapse. We fully intend to see to it that all those who have criminal responsibility are brought to justice."

Enron, once the seventh-largest US company, collapsed after the disclosure of myriad accounting schemes that hid billions of dollars in debts in December 2001 in what was the largest US bankruptcy case ever at the time.

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