The Guiltiest Guys in the Room

By Onnesha Roychoudhuri, AlterNet. Posted May 26, 2006.

After enduring four months of testy and often sensational testimony, jurors finally reached a verdict yesterday in the case against former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling and founder Ken Lay. Found guilty of both fraud and conspiracy, Skilling and Lay each face a minimum of 25 years in prison.

Sift through the headlines on the Enron verdict, and you're likely to be left with the sense that the American public has emerged victorious, in the process establishing a zero-tolerance policy of fraud in business. While the verdict will certainly serve as a cautionary tale to future corporate leaders, it would be misleading to assume that the chapter on the culture of corporate corruption has been closed.

The simple fact that Skilling and Lay went to trial, took the stand and maintained, throughout the proceedings, that their actions at the helm of Enron were legitimate, reveals how normalized the chasm between morality and legality in the business world has become. Lay's and Skillings' performances in court (as well as those of their lawyers) revealed a mind-boggling disdain for the judicial process. It was clear from the very start of the trial that Lay and Skilling would be using the courtroom as a stage. Both were eager to take the stand, not primarily to deny the alleged charges, but rather to quibble over whether or not the activities were actually corrupt and illegal.

Before the jurors left to deliberate, Lay's lead lawyer, Mike Ramsey, gave them a crash course in the nuance of "innocence," explaining, "When you're say[ing you are] not guilty, you're not saying innocent. You're saying not proven to my satisfaction without hesitation." Lay himself took a similar tack, trying to further obfuscate his machinations of Enron's accounting by telling jurors that "aggressive accounting does not mean illegal accounting. People misunderstood things that were new and different as being wrong, and they weren't.''

Lay was referring to "mark-to-model" accounting, a form of numeric manipulation that Peter Elkind, co-author of "Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room," explains quite simply: "Your profits are basically whatever you say they're going to be. So if you need to book additional profits for a period, you could just say that the price of energy will go up." It is this type of market manipulation that set Enron apart from other companies, contributing to the California energy crisis, which Americans are still paying the price for.

Yet, one of the focal points of both Lay and Skilling's defense was their complaint that the prosecution was criminalizing "normal" business practices. Skilling and Lay, caught with their hands in the cookie jar, turned the tables and used the stage to aggressively argue that stealing the cookies should not be considered criminal -- tacking on the childish coda, "Everyone else is doing it anyway" for good measure.

The only thing that Lay and Skilling have expressed remorse for is that the company collapsed at all. While Enron's market manipulations and corruption ultimately cheated Americans out of over $1 billion in retirement funds and obliterated some 4,500 jobs, Lay and Skilling have seemed preoccupied only by the ego blow dealt them by their company's demise. In his closing remarks to the jury, Skilling's lead lawyer, Dan Petrocelli, piled on the pathos: "He's a tortured soul now for the rest of his life. What happened to the business that he built and now forever what it will be known as -- that's his legacy."

Onnesha Roychoudhuri is a former assistant editor of AlterNet.

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