The Enron verdicts: corruption and American capitalism

Accounts by jurors given after the verdicts were announced indicate they all agreed that the evidence against the two executives was overwhelming. It consisted mainly of testimony from over a dozen former executives, who implicated Lay and Skilling for their roles in defrauding investors and employees through various forms of accounting manipulation. The jurors quickly rejected the absurd position of the defense that Enron was basically a healthy company that collapsed into bankruptcy in December 2001 largely as the result of Wall Street machinations and negative press coverage.

Several jurors indicated they reacted negatively to the testimony of the defendants, and particularly Lay, who could not hide his arrogance while on the stand. Others said Lay’s move to sell millions of dollars of company stock in the months before the bankruptcy, even as he encouraged employees to keep buying, was appalling.

One juror noted, “That was very much the character of the person that he was. He cashed out before the employees did.” Some jurors spoke about social conditions in the US, voicing the hope that the verdicts would send a message to other executives across the country.

There is certainly an element of social protest here, directed both at Enron and the broader conditions of inequality and corporate greed, whatever limitations there might be in the jurors’ understanding of the underlying forces at work. The conviction of Lay and Skilling stems ultimately from the fact that they headed a company that engaged in market manipulations and fraud which, in their scale and flagrancy, exceeded anything that had gone before in a long history of corrupt business practices. And Enron has since been shown to have been only one of many companies that engaged in similar practices.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/may2006/enro-m29.shtml