Remarkably, almost three years after Enron‘s descent into bankruptcy amid wide-ranging allegations of corporate fraud, the Enron Task Force still has not taken a criminal indictment against a former Enron executive to trial.
And one of the first Enron-related criminal cases scheduled to go to trial this fall — the indictment against five former officers of Enron’s telecommunications unit, Enron Broadband — has been pushed back to March of next year. Yesterday, U.S. District Judge Vanessa D. Gilmore in Houston postponed the trial of the Enron Broadband criminal case to March 1, 2005.
Former Enron Broadband CEO Ken Rice pleaded guilty to one charge in July, while former Chief Operating Officer Kevin Hannon pleaded guilty to one charge earlier this week.
The first trial involving former Enron executives is scheduled to begin on September 20 in U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein‘s court in Houston in the case that is known as the Nigerian Barge case. Now that the Enron Broadband case has been pushed back to March of next year, there is a decent chance that Ken Lay‘s request for a speedy trial may result in his case being the second trial to occur of a former Enron executive.
Under normal circumstances, the Government’s cases in both the Nigerian Barge case and the Lay case appear to be weak. However, anything related to Enron is atypical. Given the public bias against Enron, the Government has a decent shot at convictions in even their weak Enron-related cases.