It’s always interesting to watch the machinations that occur whenever academics must address a conflict between their academic principles and the devilish necessity of money.
This Houston Chronicle story picks up on this earlier article concerning the University of Missouri-Columbia‘s dilemma regarding what they should with a substantial endowment donated by former Enron Corp. Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay if Mr. Lay is convicted of securities fraud in his pending Enron-related criminal case.
In one of the understatements of the year to date, UM officials say they would “prefer” to remove Mr. Lay’s name from a yet unfilled economics professorship he endowed if he is convicted. However, under the terms of the donation contract, such a move would require the return of Mr. Lay’s 1999 donation of $1.1 million to the school. The professorship remains unfilled to date.
Talk about a tough decision. This one is getting the attention of the highest levels of the UM administration.
In an e-mail obtained by the Columbia Daily Tribune, UM Chancellor Richard Wallace told UM President Elson Floyd and the university’s Board of Curators about discussions he and Provost Brady Deaton had about the Lay chair in economics:

“Unless Mr. Lay is convicted of a felony, the money in the endowment should be retained and used for the purpose for which it was established,” Wallace wrote. “If found guilty then we would prefer to remove the name from the chair and, in accord with the terms of the endowment, we believe that this would require returning the money to Mr. Lay.”

And we thought the periodic scandals in UM’s basketball program caused difficult issues!
From my vantage point, the UM administration is engaging in muddled thinking here. Regardless of the outcome of Mr. Lay’s criminal case, it is reasonably clear that Mr. Lay was at least negligent to some extent in connection with the collapse of a major American corporation that cost investors and creditors billions and that he led a company that now has become synonymous in American society (or at least on Letterman and Leno) with corrupt business practices. Whatever the outcome of Mr. Lay’s criminal trial, that is not going to change. Consequently, using the outcome of the criminal trial as the standard on whether to keep the money seems to be a misplaced standard to use under these circumstances.
If UM decided that it should not keep the donation, I really could not quibble with such a decision. Frankly, there would probably be some public relations benefit to the University in doing so. However, it seems to me that this dilemma also provides an opportunity for a bit of academic administration creativity.
I propose that UM go ahead and fill the chair with Mr. Lay’s name on it and use it to promote academic research into risk analysis in economics and business. Enron was a staggering investment loss, but the risk of such a loss and related insolvency is arguably the most important assessment that is made in any investment decision. Although Mr. Lay’s legacy in business is certainly different from what UM thought it would be in 1999 when it accepted his donation, that legacy nevertheless reflects one key aspect of business and economics. Why not use Mr. Lay’s donation and the unfortunate circumstances of Enron’s demise to promote research into issues relating to the risk of loss and insolvency?

Following on this earlier Wall Street Journal ($) profile, Mary Flood, who has been covering the Enron case for the Houston Chronicle, interviews Mike Ramsey, lead criminal defense attorney for Kenneth Lay, in today’s Chronicle. Not much of Mr. Ramsey’s insight on the Enron case is provided in the interview, although Mr. Ramsey does comment on Mr. Lay’s controversial strategy of vigorously defending himself in public statements, interviews, and press conferences from the criminal charges:

Q: Other lawyers have said you are taking risks in letting Lay speak publicly now and in demanding a speedy trial. Why have you chosen these strategies?
A: I think basically at the behest of Mr. Lay. I have been over the documents enough to know and trust that he is, in fact, innocent. But he has been silent for two and a half years, while he has suffered a lot in the press. I think it’s about time that he speaks out.
Now, it is a high-risk strategy in some cases to have a defendant testify. But Ken Lay is smart, he’s the master of the facts, he knows what happened, and I don’t have to go hold hands with him when he talks.

Another interesting comment comes after Mr. Ramsey explains why he decided to go into the practice of criminal law:

. . . [I]f there is a danger to the Republic, it comes from concentration of power in the hands of a few in Washington, not from an outside force of any sort. We’re impervious to that.
No one will topple America from the outside. But we may very well lose liberties internally. And if people are not willing to stand up and challenge the government, then the government continues to assume more and more power over us as individuals.
Until you see how vicious it becomes out on the point of a stick where it pierces flesh, you don’t understand how powerful the government really is and needs to be held in check.
And if there is any redeeming social value to the defense practice, it is that we are the people to whom it is given the high duty, I believe, to stand up and tell the government to go to hell when they need to be told that.
And this is such a case.
Q: Do you see the Enron Task Force as part of this potential growing evil?
A: Yes. I think that the constitution of any special group of prosecutors who pick their target before they do their investigation is dangerous and an aberration that shouldn’t be tolerated.

The unusual nature of Ken Lay‘s somewhat desperate public relations campaign in connection with the criminal charges that are pending against him has been noted earlier here, here, and here.
Not to be outdone, the Enron Task Force pumped its PR machine into action by leaking to the Houston Chronicle this allegedly secret memo between former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow and former Enron chief accountant Richard Causey.
The gist of the Chronicle article is that, according to the Task Force, the memo proves that Fastow and Causey had secret side deals in which Enron guaranteed a great rate of return for the off-balance sheet partnerships that Fastow ran and in which Enron allegedly parked poorly-performing assets and hid enormous amounts of debt. The Task Force contends that the secret memo agreement between Fastow and Causey proves that the off-balance sheet partnerships were not entities at risk and, thus, should have been reported as a part of Enron’s consolidated financial statements. If that had been done, then Enron would have been revealed to the marketplace as a highly-leveraged company that would not have generated anything close to the investor interest that pushed the stock price to $80 a share in early 2001.
The Chronicle goes on to speculate that the revelation of the memo puts pressure on Mr. Causey to plea bargain with the Task Force:

A handwritten memo detailing secret side deals between ex-Enron Chief Accounting Officer Rick Causey and ex-Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow has defense lawyers predicting that Causey is under greater pressure to seek a deal with the government.
The document, which prosecutors have called the “global galactic” agreement, seemed a part of Enron folklore until it was cited as an actual written agreement in the indictment of ex-Chairman Ken Lay earlier this month.

Since Fastow has already pleaded guilty to two felony charges and is cooperating with the government, the written document can’t hurt him in the criminal arena. Most lawyers contacted this week suspect prosecutors received the written agreement from Fastow.
“It’s a very difficult document for team Causey. It’s as tough a document to refute as I’ve seen in the Enron case,” said a lawyer for one of the Enron criminal defendants who asked that his name not be used.
He and other defense lawyers in Enron cases, who spoke off the record, said there is growing expectation, largely because of this document, that Causey could be pressured to cooperate with the government.

As if facing what amounts to be a life sentence if convicted of the criminal charges against him is not enough incentive for Mr. Causey to entertain a plea bargain.
Despite the representations in the Chronicle article, most attorneys close to the Enron case have known for some time about the Fastow-Causey memo. And, although not a good piece of evidence for Mr. Causey, it is a decidedly double-edged sword for the Task Force in regard to the other Enron-related defendants. Unless the Task Force can prove that other Enron defendants such as Mr. Lay or former CEO Jeffrey Skilling knew of the Fastow-Causey memo, then the memo may be used as exculpatory evidence for other Enron defendants who could reasonably claim that the Fastow-Causey agreement was secret, that they would have never approved of it, and that the memo proves that Mr. Fastow truly was the loose cannon who manipulated Enron’s finances for personal gain to the extent that he ultimately triggered its collapse.

According to this Houston Chronicle article, Ken Lay‘s criminal defense attorney, Mike Ramsey, is apparenly not happy that Enron Task Force lawyers had sent letters to U.S. District Judge Sim Lake in late May and mid-June indicating that they were going to indict Mr. Lay in the pending criminal case against former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling and former Enron chief accountant Richard Causey.
Mr. Ramsey is not happy because the Task Force lawyers, at the same time they were sending these letters to Judge Lake, were advising Mr. Ramsey that they had not decided whether they were going to indict Mr. Lay. Mr. Ramsey says that he would never have met with the prosecutors to attempt to persuade them not to indict Mr. Lay if he had known that they had already decided to indict Mr. Lay.
Mr. Ramsey presumably gave this information to the Chronicle with a straight face.

One of the most interesting aspects of the government’s indictment against former Enron Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay is that it does not includes any insider trading charges. On the other hand, the SEC’s civil complaint against Mr. Lay includes insider trading charges. Why the difference?
This Business Week article does a good job of summarizing why the government elected not to bring the insider trading charges and why the SEC believes that it can make its insider trader case against Mr. Lay:

In 2001, Enron Corp. was quietly lurching from crisis to crisis. Whatever he did or didn’t know about Enron’s woes at the time, Kenneth L. Lay rarely missed an opportunity to talk up the oil-and-gas trading concern with analysts and Enron employees. The ex-chairman and CEO even urged workers to follow his lead and buy stock. From August through October, 2001, Lay bought $4 million worth of Enron shares — which he cites as proof that he had faith in the company.
But there’s a hitch. Privately, Lay was dumping far more stock than he publicly acquired, according to criminal and civil charges filed against him on July 8. In the same three months, he sold $26 million of Enron shares. Altogether in 2001 he unloaded Enron stock for $90 million. But because those shares were sold back to Enron, Lay did not have to disclose the sales until 2002, thanks to a loophole — since closed — in Securities & Exchange Commission rules.
The difference between Lay’s public statements and private actions is the foundation of the SEC’s civil charges — one of the more aggressive interpretations of insider-trading law in decades. Opening a new chapter in the SEC’s pursuit of alleged corporate crooks, the agency, in effect, is putting all CEOs on warning: They now face the risk of violating insider-trading laws when they trade company stock or borrow against it.

The article then goes on to explain how Mr. Lay cashed out of Enron stock while publicly appearing to support the company:

In 2001, according to the suit, he borrowed a total of $77.5 million from Enron, spread out over 20 transactions, and repaid the loans entirely with Enron shares. The repayments often came within a few days. Such stock sales vastly outweighed purchases. In seven transactions from August, 2001 — when he resumed the CEO job after Jeffrey K. Skilling’s surprise resignation — through October, 2001, he converted more than 918,000 shares into $26 million. “He was selling all the time,” says Duke University law professor James D. Cox. “And the number of shares he sold is staggering.”
Lay doesn’t see it that way. In public he has said that he sold because he needed the funds. He had pledged his shares as collateral for some $100 million in personal loans from three commercial banks. When the value of his Enron stock declined, his bankers made margin calls or demands that he increase his collateral. In his trial, Lay is expected to claim that, with few other assets he could easily sell to satisfy those demands, he was forced to borrow from Enron, repay the Enron loans with stock, and use the proceeds to pay off the banks.

And the foregoing is the crux of why the Justice Department passed on indicting Mr. Lay for illegal insider trading, while the SEC decided to take its shot on those causes of action in its civil complaint:

Justice would have had to show beyond a reasonable doubt that Lay possessed important information the market lacked and that he intentionally traded to take advantage of that information. The SEC’s burden of proof is lower. It need only show that the preponderance of evidence points to insider trading. The SEC complaint argues that Lay’s trades reveal an effort to pump up the shares, dump his stock, and skirt disclosure rules that might tip off investors.
Under then-SEC rules, sales of stock back to the company did not have to be reported until 45 days after the close of the calendar year in which the trades occurred. So when Lay urged Enron employees to buy on Sept. 26, 2001, he knew there would be no record of his sales. SEC filings showed only that he had bought that $4 million worth of stock.
The SEC case, however, is equally significant for the new liabilities it could create for other execs. Agency officials believe it’s relatively common for managers to try to have their cash and keep their shares, too, by borrowing against their stock. Doing so allows them to avoid sending bearish signals to investors while still monetizing their shares. The Lay case seems to show that the SEC views the practice as deceptive. “I think the SEC clearly is saying that you’re going to have to disclose if you’re borrowing against your stock because, in effect, that’s a sale,” says UCLA law professor Stephen M. Bainbridge.

The agency also is warning that execs may be setting themselves a trap if they use shares as collateral. Monetizing shares via loans could create a motive to pump up the stock and, as with Lay, subject execs to insider-trading charges if they later sell because of margin calls, . . .

UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge — who provides the consistently best analysis in the blogosphyere on issues pertaining to corporate law — notes in this post that the SEC is charting a new course in the Lay case that should give all corporate officers pause as they consider borrowing money with their company stock pleadged as collateral.

This Wall Street Journal ($) article profiles Houston criminal defense attorney, Mike Ramsey, who is heading up the criminal defense team that is defending former Enron Chairman and CEO, Kenneth Lay. The article captures Mr. Ramsey’s homespun wit in the following passage:

Even if he doesn’t succeed in gaining a separate trial, the effort gives Mr. Ramsey the opportunity to showcase is readiness to quickly rebut the charges. He seems to particularly enjoy attacking the bank-fraud charges brought against Mr. Lay in connection with loans he took out between 1999 and 2001. Part of the loan-related criminal charges involves a federal banking rule known as Regulation U.
Mr. Ramsey asserts that the government is unfairly going after his client for an alleged violation of some obscure rule. Until the indictment, says Mr. Ramsey, “I thought Reg U was a tomato sauce.”

As noted on this blog before, Mr. Ramsey is a member of Houston’s remarkably talented criminal defense bar, which in many respects is the legacy of legendary Houston-based criminal defense lawyers, Racehorse Haynes and the late Percy Foreman. A couple of other members of this prominent group of Houston criminal defense lawyers — Dan Cogdell and Tom Hagemann — will be defending clients in the upcoming mid-August trial of the Enron-related case known as the Nigerian Barge case.
Other prominent members of Houston’s criminal defense bar include Dick DeGuerin, who along with Mr. Ramsey, obtained the remarkable acquittal of murder charges for Robert Durst, Dick’s brother, Mike DeGeurin (yes, the brothers spell their last name differently), Jack Zimmerman, Rusty Hardin, David Berg, Joel Androphy, Robert Scardino, Mike Hinton, and Robert Sussman. The expertise and talent of Houston’s criminal defense bar compares favorably with that of any criminal defense bar of any city in the country.

The Wall Street Journal’s ($) Holman Jenkins’ weekly column today addresses the different troubles facing former Enron Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay and Pfizer’s CEO Hank McKinnell.
First, Mr. Jenkins examines the indictment against Mr. Lay and observes that it essentially charges him with the crime of making false public statements in carrying out his duty to save Enron. That duty to Enron’s shareholders, investors and creditors conflicted with Mr. Lay’s other duty to tell the truth to those same folks:

Much will depend on what he was told by Enron employees in the weeks between his return to the CEO’s job and Enron’s collapse a few weeks later. The famous Sherron Watkins memo and follow-up meeting may have put Mr. Lay in the proverbial double bind. He could have told employees and investors that Enron had many sound businesses but, alas, the accounting mess would likely provoke a crisis of confidence among lenders and trade partners, driving the company out of business for lack of credit to continue its day-to-day operations.
Saying as much, of course, would have precipitated the very implosion that it was Mr. Lay’s mission to prevent for the benefit of employees, creditors and investors. “Oh well,” he might have said, “I saw my duty and did it. I disclosed all the material facts that investors deserve to know, even if it means the stock will go to zero before they can act on it.”
Failing to do so is what he’s being prosecuted for now, in good part. The indictment dwells most heavily on his public statements of confidence in the company after he reclaimed the helm of a sinking ship. No, we wouldn’t even try to guess at a solution for this problem. In theory investors deserve the truth, even when it hurts. Please, can’t somebody in the economics department figure out a way to measure how many companies lied their way back to solvency, saving their shareholders a total loss?

The other trial that Mr. Jenkins addresses is a financial and political one, which Pfizer and other drug companies face in a marketplace that increasingly limits the ability of U.S. drug companies to generate profits and fund research and development on new drugs:

By decade’s end, the last major market where prescription drugs aren’t currently subjected to price controls — the giant U.S. market — will feel the touch of the visible hand. Perversely, the industry can thank George W. Bush. Whatever he intended with his Medicare reform, the government sooner or later will try to limit its pharmaceutical spending on seniors by dictating prices.
History is replete with industries with high fixed costs and low marginal costs that embraced government regulation, believing they could capture the regulatory process and assure themselves an acceptable rate of return. Some say the drug companies will manage the politics of price regulation too, making up on volume what they lose in dictated prices. Don’t bet the cat on it. That approach ended badly for the railroad and electric power industries, and both could at least demonstrate clearly for regulators the relation between capital going into the pipeline and services to the public coming out the other end. Drug investment, by contrast, is a speculative shot in the dark, unfit for any kind of regulatory review that we can think of.

Mr. McKinnell at least sounds like a man who believes this future can be avoided, pressing for the U.S. to challenge price controls in other countries so Americans aren’t stuck bearing the whole cost themselves of the industry’s massive R&D budgets.

Inasmuch as the Bush Adminstration lacks a coherent approach to reforming America’s health care finance system, count me as skeptical that this administration can develop a sensible plan to require other countries to fund a fair share of drug R&D costs.

Enron’s excesses and the unprecedented media firestorm over the company’s collapse have muddled the reasoning of even normally clear thinking business columnists.
The latest to be afflicted is the Wall Street Journal’s ($) Alan Murray, who comes up with this doozy in his column today:

Mr. Lay spent more time schmoozing with politicians and picking fabric swatches for his Gulfstream V corporate jet than studying special-purpose enterprises. As a result, his footprints inside the energy company are shallow, and his fingerprints few. Conviction will be difficult.

In the case of Enron, we already know a giant financial fraud lay at the heart of the enterprise. The convictions of former Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow and former Treasurer Ben Glisan established that. At stake in the Lay case isn’t whether fraud was committed but whether the chief executive should be held [criminally] responsible.
For the sake of American capitalism, he should.

Mr. Murray then goes on to base this rather startling expansion of criminal liability on the anecdotal experience of Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan:

In unusually clear testimony in July 2002, Chairman Greenspan railed against the “infectious greed” that had invaded American business, arguing that the best antidote was strong and ethical CEOs. “It has been my experience on numerous corporate boards that CEOs who insist that their auditors render objective accounts get them,” Mr. Greenspan said, “and CEOs who discourage corner-cutting by subordinates are rarely exposed to it.”
“Although we may not be able to change the character of corporate officers,” he concluded, “we can change behavior through incentives and penalties.” That is what is at stake in the Lay case.

So, let’s see here. Mr. Murray reasons that, in the “special” case of a business executive, we should treat them like bank robbers in the criminal justice system even though the business executive did not intentionally commit a crime. If the CEO is simply lazy and negligent, then Mr. Murray reasons that she is intentionally neligent and lazy and, therefore, should have the same degree of criminal liability as the bank robber.
As one of my former professors used to say whenever confronted with such muddled reasoning: “Pooh-pah.”
First, using the criminal justice system to remedy the problem that Mr. Murray addresses is akin to using an ax where a scalpel is needed and available. Extending criminal laws that penalize intentional crimes to penalize lazy and negligent businesspeople has the primary effect of confusing and ultimately undermining society’s confidence in the rule of law. Indeed, such application of criminal laws may deter a few folks from becoming CEO’s in the first place (although there is no empirical data supporting such a proposition), but it will not deter laziness or negligence.
However, even more important is the slippery slope. If Mr. Lay should be convicted for being lazy and negligent, then why should Enron’s directors not also be convicted of the same crime? Or should they not be held criminally responsible for their laziness and negligence because they only flew commercial while Mr. Lay flew in the company’s Gulfstream V? Or because their stock options were considerably less than Mr. Lay’s? Or is it because they could not have reasonably known that Mr. Fastow was a crook while Mr. Lay should have?
Similarly, what does the system do with the CEO who is not lazy or negligent, but is truly undermined by crafty underlings who figure out a way to defraud the company despite the CEO’s diligence? Convict the CEO anyway? Or carve out an exception to the crime if the jury finds that the CEO is not lazy or negligent? And if that exception is crafted, can you imagine the procedures and systems that CEO’s would establish so that they would appear not to be lazy and negligent, particularly if they really were lazy and negligent? What webs Mr. Murray would have us weave!
Part of the cost of a free and productive economy is the risk of Enron-type failure. Misapplying criminal law neither will nor should deter such failures, and is much more likely to promote societal cynicism than responsible business practices. As Professor Ribstein notes in his post on Mr. Murray’s column, “we have the tools within our current system. Responding to Ken Lay’s irresponsibility with equivalent excesses in criminal prosecutions is not the answer.”
For a reasoned argument in favor of holding CEO’s responsible as a principal for corporate wrongdoing, see this Professor Bainbridge post, although Brad DeLong is not so sure.

On the heels of his indictment and earlier extraordinary NY Times interview, the Houston Chronicle reporter Mary Flood interviewed former Enron Chairman and CEO Ken Lay on Friday on a wide range of topics relating to the indictment, his initial court appearance, and his post-Enron life.
On the indictment, Lay made the following observations:

He said he didn’t lie to Arthur Andersen accountants in an October 2001 meeting about how big a financial writedown hit the company might have to take for overpaying for a water company. He said the accountants gave him the numbers and told him what was going on.
Lay said he can’t be accused of misrepresenting the health of Enron’s retail business because he thought it was fine. He said there were legitimate business reasons for taking a wildly unprofitable section of the retail business and merging it into the profitable wholesale section, and it wasn’t meant to hide losses.
And he said he did not feel he deceived employees when he told them to buy Enron stock in September 2001 and said he’d recently purchased some himself, while never saying he’d sold six times as much stock as he’d bought.
“I don’t suppose I even thought about it,” Lay said of mentioning the $24 million in cash he’d taken out of the company in trade for Enron stock, but telling employees about the $4 million in stock he bought. “I don’t think it’s deceptive … but the (government) tries to spin sinister thoughts and motives around things,” he said.

And how did Mr. Lay pass the time in the holding cell between arriving at the federal courthouse on Thursday and his initial court appearance?:

. . .Lay started chatting with a couple of other men in his holding cell.
The two, in green prison garb and leg irons, were charged in the smuggling ring deaths of 19 undocumented workers in Victoria.
“One young man said: `I think I saw you on TV last night,’ ” recalled Lay, who had surrendered that day and was awaiting a court hearing so he could be freed on bond.
So for the next three hours, the former CEO and two alleged human smugglers talked. Defendants from other holding cells soon chimed in.
“A couple even asked me for investment advice,” Lay said with a laugh.
His response: “Well, I’ve not really thought much about that recently,” said Lay, who lost hundreds of millions of dollars after Enron’s collapse.

As noted before, Mr. Lay’s campaign to defend himself publicly is highly unusual in a criminal case of this nature. However, the public perception of anybody associated with Enron is so negative that Mr. Lay and his attorneys have apparently concluded that Mr. Lay has little to lose by attempting to persuade at least one potential juror that his management failures at Enron were not criminal in nature. All attorneys representing Enron-related defendants will be watching the upcoming trial in the Nigerian Barge criminal case closely to evaluate whether it is possible for a defendant tainted with the Enron association to receive a fair trial in this highly anti-Enron environment.
Meanwhile, The Economist — which has been providing some of the most insightful coverage of the Enron affair — notes that Mr. Lay’s defense theory of being an avuncular grandfather who was betrayed by underlings may be hard to prove:

In truth, though, Mr Lay was never the simpleton he now makes himself out to have been. Four years ago, in an interview with The Economist, he revealed an aggressive and somewhat dark management streak. In reply to a question about Enron?s perceived arrogance and disdain for the law, he pointed to what he considered another great firm unfairly maligned by ignorant critics as arrogant: Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment bank that?like Enron?rose quickly from obscurity to market dominance during the junk-bond boom of the 1980s, only to implode amid charges of wrongdoing. Mr Lay gushed about the brilliance of Michael Milken, Drexel?s star trader, who ended up in jail. Mr Milken (a ?dear friend?) was accused of being arrogant, he said, but was just being ?very innovative and very aggressive?. Prosecutors will no doubt argue that the fraud at Enron was a direct result of Mr Lay?s push to make the company just as ?innovative? and ?aggressive? as the defunct Drexel.

In the meantime, the Lay Endowed Chair in Economics at the University of Missouri remains unfilled.

It looked like a video campsite outside the Federal Courthouse in Houston on Thursday as the media gathered to observe the spectacle of former Enron Chairman and CEO Kenneth Lay being led into the courthouse in handcuffs. Mr. Lay pled not guilty to an 11 count indictment that was included in a superceding indictment against Mr. Lay’s co-defendants, former Enron CEO Jeffrey Skilling and former Enron chief accountant, Richard Causey. The case is pending before U.S. District Judge Sim Lake, an able and fair judge who oversaw the sad case of Jamie Olis earlier this year.
In an unusual response in case that seems to generate unconventional moves, Mr. Lay conducted a press conference soon after his initial court appearance in which he asserted that he was not responsible for the company’s accounting problems and that former Enron CFO Andrew Fastow was to blame for most of Enron’s problems. During the press conference, Mr. Lay acknowledged that there had been wrongdoing at Enron, but claimed he did not know about it and that Mr. Fastow had betrayed his position of trust at Enron.
Defendants in high-profile criminal cases usually do not make public comments on their case out of fear that the statements could provide new ammunition to prosecutors. But Mr. Lay’s attorneys almost certainly feel that the public climate related to anything having to do with Enron is so polluted that they have little to lose by attempting to have Mr. Lay proclaim his side of the story publicly, just as he did in this earlier extraordinary interview in the NY Times.
The indictment alleges that Mr. Lay played a criminally culpable but surprisingly limited role in a massive conspiracy to deceive and defraud investors of Enron. The 11 criminal counts accuse Mr. Lay of helping to manipulate Enron’s financial statements and giving a false picture of the company’s financial health in the months before it filed its chapter 11 case in early December 2001.
One of the most interesting aspects of the indictment is that it acknowledges that Mr. Lay was not the most important player in the alleged criminal enterprise. The indictment paints Mr. Lay more as a protector of the alleged manipulative scheme by keeping it secret from the public. Indeed, all of the misdeeds attributed to Mr. Lay occurred after Mr. Skilling’s August, 2001 departure.
The indictment alleges that, until his resignation, Mr. Skilling “spearheaded” the alleged scheme and only afterward did Mr. Lay take “over leadership of the conspiracy.” The indictment against Mr. Lay focuses on the period after Mr. Skilling’s resignation, which was the period in which elaborate financial structures used to mask Enron’s true debt load became unstable and began straining the company financially.
The indictment describes several times in which Mr. Lay represented to equities analysts, credit-rating agencies and employees that the company was financially sound when, the indictment alleges, Mr. Lay knew that the company was not. The indictment alleges that Mr. Lay was being apprised on a daily basis by other Enron managers regarding the company’s financial condition, and that Mr. Lay helped devise strategies for attempting to hide even larger losses than those reported in the third quarter of 2001.
According to the indictment, a crucial period involving Mr. Lay began with a September 26, 2001 online forum he had with Enron employees. In that forum, Mr. Lay informed employees the “third quarter is looking great” even though he knew that the company would soon be reporting a giant loss for the period because of a write-down of assets, that Enron’s balance sheet contained billions of dollars of “embedded losses” and “overvalued investments,” and that the company “had been exploring such drastic solutions to Enron’s financial problems as a merger with another company (what turned out to be the ill-fated Dynegy merger). The indictment contended that Mr. Lay followed up this conference with a series of similarly misleading presentations to securities analysts and others in October and November, 2001.
The indictment includes a number of sentencing allegations that address last month’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Blakely case that is being construed as limiting federal judges’ ability to boost convicts’ sentences beyond the lower end of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines range. Among these allegations are that the losses related to Enron exceeded $100 million and involved more than 50 victims, levels that put a white-collar offender at the top of the federal fraud guidelines range for sentencing purposes. Consequently, if convicted on all counts, Mr. Lay could face what amounts to a life sentence in prison and millions of dollars in financial penalties.
After Mr. Lay’s initial appearance, veteran Houston criminal defense lawyer Mike Ramsey stated that he would file a motion to sever Mr. Lay’s case from that of Messrs. Skilling and Causey and hoped to be in trial by September of this year, which is highly unlikely in a case of this magnitude. Mr. Ramsey acknowledged that Enron had problems when Mr. Lay retook control in August 2001, but observed that all major corporations have problems and that Mr. Lay strongly believed that, despite the problems, Enron was doing well overall and had a bright future.
In a related action, the Securities and Exchange Commission piled on Mr. Lay by filing civil charges of fraud and insider trading against him in Houston federal court. Those civil charges allege that Mr. Lay lied to investors about Enron’s financial health and falsely inflated the company’s share price so he could profit from a series of stock transactions. Unlike the criminal cases against Messrs. Skilling and Causey, Mr. Lay was not criminally charged with insider trading of Enron stock, but the SEC’s civil action included such a charge.
Meanwhile, other than the criminal prosecution that put Arthur Andersen out of business, the Enron Task Force still has not prosecuted a single trial of a former Enron executive, primarily because the Task Force’s sledgehammer approach to indicting executives has elicited guilty pleas from the executives charged to date in order to take advantage of prison sentences that are a fraction of the length that the executives would face if they took their cases to trial.
The first trial of a former Enron executive is currently scheduled to begin in mid-August in the so-called “Nigerian Barge case” before U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein. Under normal circumstances, that case would not be a strong case for the prosecution. However, normal circumstances simply do not exist in regard to Enron, so all parties and counsel involved in the Enron-related cases will be watching that case closely to determine whether it is possible for an Enron defendant to receive a fair trial in today’s negatively charged atmosphere for anything related to Enron.
On that latter point, Professor Ribstein — rested from his Scottish holiday — hits the nail on the head with his latest observation regarding Mr. Lay and Enron.