The Knucklehead of the Day Carnival Part Nine

These winners are so obvious you were probably wondering when if I was going to get around them.

Our ninth winners for today are Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling. Yesterday Lay and Skilling were found guilty in federal court for their part in the Enron debacle.

Other Bloggers like Professor Bainbridge have written extensively on the verdicts. All I say is hoorah. These two men seem clueless as to what they brought about. For screwing Enron employees and Shareholders, Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are two more of our knuckleheds of the day.

Open Post- Bright & Early

In a dramatic resolution to a landmark criminal case that defined an era of corporate fraud in the USA, a jury here found former Enron CEOs Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling guilty on all counts of conspiring to hide the company's financial condition in 2000 and 2001.

The verdict was a resounding victory for federal prosecutors who had spent four years building a criminal case against two men once celebrated as business visionaries.

It was also a total repudiation of Lay and Skilling, who both testified that Enron was a fundamentally sound company brought low in a market panic spurred by short sellers and negative media reports. The government had argued Enron was a speculative trading company that boosted its earnings through deceptive accounting and bogus claims about the growth potential of new business units.

The jury found Lay, 64, guilty of six counts of conspiracy and fraud. Skilling, 52, was convicted on 18 counts of conspiracy and securities fraud but acquitted on nine out of 10 counts of illegal inside trading.

Lay was not charged with inside trading, but in a news conference after the verdict was announced, jurors said Lay's incessant selling of stock in the months leading up to Enron's collapse was evidence of intent to deceive the public about Enron's financial health.

The two men, who stood stoically in the courtroom while the verdicts were announced, even as their families and lawyers were overwhelmed with emotion, are scheduled to be sentenced on Sept. 11. Because of the magnitude of the financial losses caused by Enron's collapse into bankruptcy in December 2001, which erased more than $60 billion of market value, both men could spend the rest of their lives in prison.

Cross Posted to Bullwinkle Blog