Enron Trial Avoids the Real Rip-Off
By Jason Leopold
Monday 27 February 2006

More than 400 pages of documents released by federal energy regulators suggest that former Enron chairman Ken Lay and former chief executive Jeff Skilling were aware that the company's west coast traders may have broken the law by using manipulative trading tactics in California to boost Enron's profits during the height of the state's power crisis.

Skilling and Lay are being prosecuted for securities fraud and numerous other charges in a federal courthouse in Houston. A judge has prohibited prosecutors from introducing recorded evidence related to the California energy crisis in the case against Skilling and Lay, saying it's too "prejudicial."

The transcripts are from recorded conversations between Enron traders, company attorneys and Enron's public and governmental affairs departments that took place at the height of the California electricity crisis in 2000 and 2001. The material provides the most vivid portrait to date of the company's questionable trading practices that ignited California's power crisis, and led to a financial meltdown at the company which Lay and Skilling hid from securities regulators and investors, and which both men are now being prosecuted for.

In the spring of 2001, one of Enron's most powerful Washington lobbyists met with several members of the Bush administration to talk about Enron's opposition to price controls on electricity sales in California.

The lobbyist was told by Tim Belden, the mastermind behind Enron's notorious trading scams, less than a year earlier that Belden and other Enron traders who worked in Portland, Oregon, spent the better part of 2000 and 2001 breaking the rules governing California's power market "when opportunities presented themselves to make money."... http://tinyurl.com/q75m4
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