Results tagged “enronbroadbandservices”

Good morning, Houston. We thought that ding someone put in the door of our 1983 Diatribe in the Starbucks parking lot the other day was bad, but then we heard about the $150,000 Aston Martin damaged last week when a car went out of control and slammed into a southwest Houston car dealership. It happened when a pickup truck hit Leonard Ross' car while he was on the Southwest Freeway feeder road near Fountain... more ›

Prosecutors in the various Enron trials have been busy this week filing rebuttals to requests from former executives including Jeff Skilling, who asked for a new trial and the chance to interview jurors who convicted him in May. more ›

Oil prices fell almost $2 a barrel today on profit-taking; analysts said the drop will likely be temporary The re-trials of three Enron Broadband Services execs will begin May 2, a day later than expected, because of what may be a long jury selection process A 2-year-old toddler was killed Sunday when his family's barbecue pit fell over on him, police said A Needville church was destroyed by fire this morning; officials said it might... more ›

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling's lawyers continued hammering at key points of the prosecution's case in the trial of the two ex-Enron executives yesterday, focusing on former CFO Andy Fastow's alleged attempt to get preferential treatment for his LJM side companies. more ›

Yesterday in the Lay/Skilling trial, defense lawyers hit witness Kevin Hannon right where it hurt: in the funny bone. Hannon, the former CEO of Enron Broadband Services, testified Thursday that ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling told executives during a May 2001 meeting, "They're on to us," referring to a Wall Street investment firm questioning Enron's earnings. On Monday, Skilling lawyer Mark Holscher asked Hannon whether Skilling might not have made the statement sarcastically: "Anything's possible," Hannon... more ›

The latest witness in the Lay/Skilling trial testified that ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling told a group of top Enron executives, "They're on to us," referring to Wall Street analysts who asked questions about the company's earnings, the value of its Internet division and the stability of its trading arm. The comment came during a May 2001 meeting that former Enron Broadband Services CEO Kevin Hannon told jurors about Thursday: He said Skilling, [ex-Enron Chairman] Ken... more ›

Enron's former managing director of investor relations, Paula Rieker, testified Tuesday that Ken Lay just might have been one of the bad guys, alleging that she directly confronted Lay about misleading outsiders, but he continued doing so anyway. It was Rieker's first day of testimony in the trial of ex-Enron Chariman Lay and former CEO Jeff Skilling. more ›

After a long weekend, we expect the Lay/Skilling trial-ravaganza to return with renewed vigor. Last week, things ended on an upbeat note when the third witness — yes, that's right, three whole witnesses in three weeks! — took the stand. That third witness was accountant Terry West, who started working at Enron in 1981, before it was even called Enron. West testified that her boss was told in 2000 to decrease the company's estimated earnings... more ›

Though ex-Enron Broadband Services head Ken Rice stuck by his story of misleading company directors, employees and analysts with regard to EBS' failing corporate health Thursday, he said he doesn't remember confronting former Enron CEO Jeff Skilling about the deception. Much of Rice's third day on the stand in the trial of Ken Lay and Skilling was spent under cross-examination by Mark Holscher, one of Skilling's lawyers, who tried to undermine some of Rice's accusations about deceptive earnings reports: more ›

During his second day on the witness stand, former Enron Broadband Services head Ken Rice said his company might have had potential to perhaps succeed, maybe, sometime in the future if it had survived Enron's 2001 collapse. On his first day on the stand, prosecutors focused Rice largely on what was wrong at the company. On Tuesday, Rice said he and Skilling misrepresented the financial health of the failing broadband business to help a stock... more ›

Ken Rice, the former head of Enron Broadband Services, took the stand in the Lay/Skilling trial yesterday, painting a picture of — surprise! — a failing Enron division atrificially bolstered by misleading public reports which he said ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling endorsed. more ›

Ken Lay's lawyer Mike Ramsey spent much of Monday trying to show that Lay wasn't involved in inflated earnings reports apparently designed to hide the fact that Enron was going down in flames. In the beginning of the third week of testimony in Lay and Jeff Skilling's trial, Ramsey questioned ex-Enron head of investor relations Mark Koenig about a series of drafts of Enron's second quarter 2001 earnings report in which the earnings numbers kept changing as Enron was headed for a $1.2 billion equity write-down and $680 million in quarterly losses. more ›

Another week, another witness: Sometime early this week — maybe today — ex-Enron head of investor relations Mark Koenig's cross-examination will finally end and another former exec will take the stand in the trial of Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Rice, the former head of Enron Broadband Services, confessed to securities fraud in a 2004 plea agreement; last year, he testified that Skilling helped prepare a fraudulent report to analysts in 2000. Rice said the purpose of that false report was to make Enron Broadband Services look better than it was — and indeed, the company's stock price jumped 25 percent the day the report was given. But employees have testified that Enron Broadband Services never really got off the ground and had disappeared by mid-2001, a few months before Enron went bankrupt. more ›

In the first day of testimony in the Ken Lay/Jeff Skilling trial, Enron's former head of investor relations said the company's earnings were often adjusted to keep stock prices up. Mark Koenig, who worked closely with former executives Lay and Skilling, said both men were involved in financial management and that Skilling, the ex-CEO, authorized the financial deception. more ›