The Chronicle’s Claudia Feldman reports on the logistical challenge of accomodating the overflow of media representatives and spectators during the upcoming trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Inasmuch as U.S. District Judge Sim Lake’s courtroom will only accomodate 30 spaces for media, the District Clerk has arranged for a simulcast room at the courthouse that will provide another 120 seats on a first-come basis. The article notes that gibberish from certain of the media has already begun, perhaps best reflected by a BBC reporter’s over-the-top assessment of the case:

“Enron made the ground shake. This was the granddaddy of corporate scandals ó the one that made us doubt what we were being told as investors, the one that made us look at corporations in a whole new light.”

My sense is that the BBC needs to work on its story line a bit. That whole “corporations are evil” thing is so “1980’s/Gordon Gekko,” don’t you think?
Meanwhile, the Chronicle’s Mary Flood reports that the Lay-Skilling defense team are taking an interlocutory appeal to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans of Judge Lake’s most recent order denying the defense’s request for a change of venue for the upcoming trial. Inasmuch as the Fifth Circuit will evaluate the appeal under the extremely difficult-to-meet standard of whether Judge Lake abused his discretion in denying the change-of-venue request, the interlocutory appeal is almost a sure loser.
Finally, the NY Times Kurt Eichenwald — whose Conspiracy of Fools (Broadway 2005) remains the best book written to date about the Enron scandal — weighs in with colleague Alexei Barrionuevo in setting the stage for the trial, which includes the following insight into the Enron Task Force’s ever-shifting theory of the case:

The government’s case is built not so much on showing that Enron was destroyed by fraud, but rather on showing that fraud, including the suspected deceptions by Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling, prevented the marketplace from knowing how badly things were going inside the company.

As the scheduled Monday commencement of the criminal trial of former key Enron executives Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling draws nearer, the Chronicle’s Mary Flood — who has spent more time on the frontlines of Enron-related cases than any other reporter — provides this overview of what to expect from the upcoming trial and John Roper follows this earlier Chronicle profile of Mr. Skilling with this article on Mr. Lay’s preprarations for the trial.
Meanwhile, over at the sparring ring where the respective legal teams prepare for battle, it looks as if the Enron Task Force is continuing to have a bit of trouble deciding on what to present to the jury. In a pleading (download here) filed earlier in the week, the Lay-Skilling defense teams reveal that the Task Force is attempting to add about a dozen, previously undisclosed allegations of wrongdoing against Messrs. Lay and Skilling in the week before trial. Such last-minute modifications reflect a prosecution team that is not particularly confident in its case. U.S. District Judge Sim Lake is expected to rule on that matter and other remaining pre-trial issues in a final pre-trial conference tomorrow afternoon.

Following on this earlier profile, the Chronicle’s Mike Tolson provides this extensive profile today of former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling as he gears up for the commencement of the Super Bowl of Enron criminal trials next Monday.
Echoing thoughts that have long been presented on this blog, Skilling in the article talks about the difficulty of defending himself in an intensely anti-Enron environment:

Skilling, as ever, insists Enron was a great, innovative company that did not deserve the fate that befell it.
“It was a complicated business, and the fact that it was complicated led to misrepresentations and a lot of what I call the urban myth of Enron,” [Skilling] said.
Rather than gather enough information to understand it, he said, people accept popular notions that it was a house of cards, perpetuated by fraud, and that Skilling was a master manipulator of impressionable young MBAs and a supersmart bamboozler who persuaded investors to buy overpriced stock so he could keep raking in fortunes in stock options.
“The way I have been portrayed is a caricature,” he said. “I don’t care what book or movie or article you are talking about, the caricature has been created and the real person kind of loses out in the process.”

Then, Skilling asks a very common sense question:

“If I were who I have been made out to be, could I have built a company? Who would have followed such a guy that has been portrayed like that?”