http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_06/b3970082.htm
Excerpt:
It is entirely possible that Lay will beat the rap. As last year's acquittal of HealthSouth Corp. (HLSH ) CEO Richard Scrushy showed, financially complex executive suite prosecutions are problematic by definition. Fraud and conspiracy are crimes of commission, not omission -- Lay's managerial forte. Lay "glided on the coattails of others and a Rolodex of influential relationships," says Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean at the Yale School of Management and founder of the Chief Executive Leadership Institute. "When he sensed dangerous truths, he saw his job as one of containment, rather than showing courage or character."
Lay is as audacious a defendant as he once was a corporate promoter. Even as the disgraced ex-CEO was readying himself for trial, he launched a PR campaign to overturn history's verdict against him with a defiant speech on Dec. 13. "Contrary to popular belief today, I firmly believe that Enron was a great company," Lay told some 250 invited VIPs at the Houston Forum. If not for the wrongdoing of "less than a handful" of rogue employees, he added, Enron would not have gone belly-up and would "still be a great and growing company today."
Very true.
If anyone's interested, here's Ken Lay's web site:
http://www.kenlayinfo.com
As last year's acquittal of HealthSouth Corp. (HLSH ) CEO Richard Scrushy showed, financially complex executive suite prosecutions are problematic by definition. Fraud and conspiracy are crimes of commission, not omission
You're right.
The defense will want to complicate the issue, and put the jurors to sleep. The prosecutors will need to keep it as simple as possible.
If they are to be successful, they will need to avoid getting bogged down in the accounting dodges and shell corporations. Just show how the executives lied to shareholders - lay the statements down side by side.
Compare the public comments about how "strong" the company was with private emails about how weak the company was, and show the jury the dates of each. They said one thing in public, and another in private.
That's how they're going to nail the crooks. Anything more complicated than that plays into the hands of the defense.