Lawyers: Enron, Worldcom chiefs may never face prosecution

[Cocoa]

:mad:

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/business/stories.nsf/Business/6231E9739269012386256D8200126C55?OpenDocument&Headline=Lawyers%3A+WorldCom,+Enron+chiefs+may+never+face+prosecution

NEW YORK - More than a year after the two biggest corporate frauds in U.S. history wiped out billions of dollars in assets and workers' pensions at WorldCom Inc. and Enron Corp., the chief executives who led those companies remain free of criminal charges.

Bernard Ebbers, Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling may never face prosecution, according to former federal prosecutors and securities lawyers.

Federal prosecutors are continuing to investigate Ebbers, the former milkman and bouncer from Alberta, Canada, who in 17 years transformed a small discount-telephone company into WorldCom, the second-biggest U.S. long-distance service.

The former chief executives of Enron - Lay and Skilling - also remain under federal investigation, 19 months after the world's largest energy trader collapsed while owing $67 billion to creditors.

more...

[GOPisEvil]

1. Yeah, but Martha Stewart is...

...explain that to me Justice Dept. Seriously. Explain it. Oh, you can't?

Justice meted out by looking down the roster of campaign contributers. Makes total sense to me. :grr:

[Ress1]

2. That's disgusting.

Steal a candy bar from 7-11 and go directly to jail. Class warfare is just a figment of the poor's imagination.

[QuietStorm]

3. If that is the case better we have sports icons as hero's.

Oh wait! What am I saying? Must be raping and pillaging are en vogue.

[Mel]

4. No Justice, No Peace

So will the employees of Eron follow these crooks around till their dying days? heckle them in public? pie in the face?

If justice won't do anything the people should make them and their families miserable and No their families aren't off limits. Cause they sure didn't think about their workers families when they where ripping them off now did they?

It is class warfare and the sooner the people that think they are rich, will be rich, or are just lucky to get by, realize that they aren't going to succeed in the enviroment of 'crony capitlism' and start fighting back we are sunk.

[QuietStorm]

5. Looks like we are sinking pretty fast.

The boat is almost knee deep in water. How far must we sink before there is an adequate uprising? Sinking doesn't seem to have done the trick.

[farmbo]

6. The Lesson: take all you can, but give a chunk of it to the GOP.

Big GOP donors got enough access, and policy changes, to line their pockets. They then rebated some of their ill-gotten gains to fund Bush/Cheney 2000 and the GOP softmoney machine.
And that same special-insider treatment now innoculates them from criminal prosecution, striking the payoff for their contributions.

Its a perpetual motion machine of a most disagreeable sort. And it is an issue that defines the corruption of this administration.

It must become a central issue of the 2004 campaign... even if we need to use paid media to showcase it.

[Blue_Roses]

7. Sickening...this is

the stuff that makes you puke up your morning breakfast. But they didn't waste anytime getting Martha Stewart...ok , justice here...ANYONE!

[indypaul]

8. The old legal maxim,

"Innocent until proven broke"

"The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But lets the greater felon loose,
That steals the common from the goose."

[Minstrel Boy]

9. outrage upon outrage upon...

"Any sense that prosecutions were inevitable has long since dissipated," said Mintz. If there were viable charges that didn't require the testimony of the chief financial officers, they would most likely have been filed by now, he said.

I suppose this means that Cliff Baxter didn't die in vain, right?

[Catherine Vincent]

10. Makes you wonder how those guys look at themselves in the mirror everyday.

EOM

[realFedUp]

11. they have gold framed mirrors...

.

[glitch]

12. vampires can't see themselves in mirrors nt

[Bandit]

14. They do so with a HUGE Smile on their face

They are laughing all the way to the bank. What ya gunna do about it?

[DemoTex]

13. Kenny-boy Lay is a Bu$hbuddy. A big Bu$hbuddy.

Lay will "rehabilitate" himself, much like Junior Bu$h "cured" himself of alcoholism. Then Lay will be loosed upon the public again to pillage and plunder in that ever-so-subtle rapacious style of his. Watch your pensions! Watch your state treasuries! Watch your wallets! It ain't over yet.

[Octafish]

15. Insufficient evidence? Bull! Kenny Boy said "Buy ENRON" ...

... to his employees as the greasy turd dumped all the stock he could. This story is infuriating. Just like the S&L fiasco — the insiders get off scott-free while the rest of the American mopes are left holding the bag. Remember the families of Mr. Baxter and the other convenient "suicides" and DEMAND an honest Attorney General go after these scum.

From the article:

...Three reports - by a former U.S. attorney general, a former director of enforcement for the Securities and Exchange Commission and a former president of the American College of Bankruptcy - found evidence of accounting manipulation at Enron and WorldCom.

Yet none cited evidence that they said proved Skilling, Ebbers or Lay committed a crime.

"The reason they haven't been indicted is because the government doesn't have the evidence at this point," Robert S. Litt, a former associate deputy U.S. attorney general, said of Ebbers, Lay and Skilling. Litt is a partner at Arnold & Porter in Washington. Irvin Nathan, also a partner at the firm, is Sullivan's lead defense lawyer.