The Chronicle’s Mary Flood, who continues to do a bang up job of keeping up with the unfolding events relating to the various aspects of the Enron scandal, has a couple of Enron-related news items today.
First, she reports that the next Enron-related criminal trial — the one known as “the Enron Broadband case” — has been pushed back to at least April 18 as a result of U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore‘s involvement in this case. Here are the previous posts on the Broadband case.
Although the intensity of the media attention given to Enron makes it seem as if there have been a plethora of criminal trials related to the case, the Broadband case is only the second criminal case involving former Enron executives that will go to trial. Interestingly, the first case — the trial of the Nigerian Barge case — resulted in convictions of four Merrill Lynch executives and one Enron mid-level executive. However, of the two Enron defendants in that case, the Enron accountant who was closest to the alleged sham transaction in that case — Sheila Kahanek — was the only defendant who the jury acquitted in the case.
The Broadband case is interesting in that it involves a division of Enron that was one of the company’s more auspicious business failures, but one that undeniably had great potential. The five remaining former Enron executives in the case will argue that Enron’s other financial problems undermined the broadband division’s business potential, and that none of their public statements regarding the division’s business opportunity were false or intentionally misleading. Although the Enron Task Force’s public stance on the case has been typically bullish, the two former Enron executives who have copped pleas in the case to date — Ken Rice and Kevin Hannon — pleaded guilty to only one count of securities fraud in their plea bargains. The nature of those pleas does not exactly reflect that the government thinks it has a lock cinch winner in this prosecution.
Meanwhile, Ms. Flood reports in this article that the Chronicle has requested that U.S. District Judge Ewing Werlein unseal a couple of pleadings that three of the convicted Nigerian Barge defendants filed in connection with their upcoming sentencing hearings. There appears to be no basis for the pleadings to be sealed permanently, so Judge Werlein will likely grant the Chronicle’s request. Probably the only reason that the pleadings have not been unsealed to date is that the Judge probably just has not gotten around yet to ruling on the defendants’ motion to seal the pleadings.
Finally, in what could be one of the more entertaining interviews of the year, former Enron chairman and CEO Ken Lay will be interviewed on this Sunday’s 60 Minutes show in connection with the release of the new Enron book, Conspiracy of Fools by New York Times reporter Kurt Eichenwald. According to Mr. Lay’s publicist, Mr. Lay rather enjoyed the book.