Jeffrey Skilling couldn’t quite manage the record. Yesterday US District Court Judge, Sim Lake, announced the prison sentence for half of the surviving duo that led Enron while it collapsed.
The 52 year old former CEO of Enron is being sent to the slammer for 24 years, the second highest prison sentence for corporate wrongdoing ever seen in the US. WorldCom’s Bernnie Ebbers still holds the record; he was sentenced to 25 years.
If Skilling’s sentence had been ten months shorter, he could have served his time in a low security unit.
As Fed laws mean that at least 85 percent of a sentence must be served, unless Skilling can have a successful appeal, he must know that he will still be in prison in his ’70s.
Skilling actually bailed out of Enron before its collapse, but by then it was too late. And although he blamed CFO, Andrew Fastow, with his infamous LJMs in which he used Enron’s money to buy the company’s assets at inflated prices, the court had previously found Skillling and the company’s chairman, Kenneth Lay, who subsequently died while in the midst of an appeal, guilty.
Skilling insisted that he was “innocent of every one of these charges,” but the judge was not impressed and while Skilling awaits his prison life, he is being forced to wear an electronic ankle bracelet so that officials can track his movements.
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