Jeff Skilling

“And in twenty-twenty, Jeff Skilling founded a new energy trading company based in Texas called Veld LLC, rumored to be working on the venture with Lou Pie.”

“It was that Jeff Skilling insisted that in order to join Enron and start this new division, Ken Lay and the board had to agree to use mark-to-market accounting.”

“So, May, 2006, a jury finally convicts Skilling of 19 out of 28 counts of wire fraud and securities fraud, and Lay gets convicted on six counts of securities fraud.”

“So when skilling gets elevated to number two and fast out to CFO the company, they start articulating as the company strategy that the finance department is going to go from being this shared resource cost center to a profit generating division of the company.”

“All told, I think Lay sells about three hundred million dollars worth of Enron stock via these transactions. Skilling sells about two hundred million, and Fastow and a bunch of the other executives sell a whole bunch too.”

“There are documents that surface that have a variety of signatures on them, but not skillings. He very intentionally was like I'm not actually gonna sign off on this, but it's kind of good for Enron that it happens, so I'm gonna let it keep happening.”

“They pioneer this market that would come to be known, and is, I think, and assumes still a very, very large part of the energy market today. Called energy derivatives. Skilling and Enron invent it and pioneer it.”

“He calls them up to do the final negotiations of the terms of his offer. He calls them up from the hospital where he is with his wife while his wife is in labor with their, I think, second child.”

“The sentence gets reduced to 14 years. Skilling ends up serving 12 in total. And is released from federal custody in February, 2019.”