Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's Jeff Skilling and Ken Lay Jurors To Be Selected Today

Well the big boys are finally starting to get into the swing of a trial. Former CEOs of Enron Jeff Skilling and Kenneth Lay will have the jury selection process begin today for their upcoming fraud trials. Lay is being charged with 7 counts of fraud, and Skilling is being charged with over 30 counts. This is primarily related to the inflation of numbers by the Enron to the investment community.

If you want a good read, Kurt Eichenwald’s Conspiracy Of Fools, is an in depth look at what happened to Enron. It starts a few years before the debaucle, and via interviews with numerous employees and outside workers who dealt with Enron, Eichenwald creates an easy to read, enjoyable book. Considering the content is a business going bankrupt, it is written like a novel.
(Note: if you pick it up via the link above, you will, in a very minute way, help keep this site operational.)

For those who are new to this story, Enron was a large US based conglomerate that started building a mountain out of a deck of cards. They borrowed money on a financial base that was built on assuming profits from 20 years down the road. The year they made this reporting change their profits spiked. With a precedent set on the growth, they had to keep building the cards to meet or beat the earnings expectations.

I paid a little bit of attention through the whole commission which investigated this, and many know that the CFO Andy Fastow, a fast living, smooth talking, salesman with little or no financial experience, is sitting in a jail cell. That raises the stakes for Lay and Skilling. This trial will, definitely, be one I watch the details on.