That is too long, IMHO. And while I feel for the people that lost all their money in 401k etc, I can not believe that they had all their money tied up in one company. Simple diversification would have saved their retirement. DD
Agreed...Was he guilty of something, yes, but was he the sole contributor, no...A lot of people lost "paper" value in there 401k...Some lost real money with Enron stock...Hell, I was one of them...
Wow....so hundreds of people deserved to have their entire retirement STOLEN because they weren't savvy investors. Skilling is a thief on an almost unimaginable scale. And guys get sent up longer for swiping a TV set. Its a longer sentence than I expected...but certainly it isn't undeserved.
The same guy that stole their retirement money also inflated it incredibly in the first place. He made every holder richer every time the company matched contributions on the 401.
Their retirement was not stolen....it's value went to zero. What kind of investor puts all their retirement monies into ONE stock? I think he deserves to be punished but not for 24 years. DD
only tards do, that is true but Skilling still committed major fraud regardless. 24 years is too much though
So he stole less than it was 'valued' as. The real value is that it was people's life savings... no matter the monetary value. And he did that to a lot of people. Monetarily, it's still in the hundreds of millions.
Would you sentance a con man who lies his way through hundreds of millions for 24 years? I think the justice is served.
I admit to being ignorant to some extent of the complexities of retirement plans. But it is my understanding that Enron employees were HEAVILY pressured to have most if not all of their retirements in Enron stock. The powers that be kept the pressure on employees to buy more stock even as they were panic selling their own holdings. As far as the employees knew they were holding stock in a viable strong company with good looking prospects. They might have reasonably expected to lose some value...perhaps falling from 80 dollars a share to 60....they had no idea that the potential to lose everything was there.
Bernie Ebbers received 25 yrs so I guess the precedent had already been set. But it seems like Ken Lay's death made Skilling the official Enron posterboy. That may have added a few years to the sentence.
You do know that Skilling is on tape at quarterly meetings ENCOURAGING employees to put ALL their retirement in Enron stocks. In fact, many companies were doing this before the dot-bomb collapse. Heck, Microsoft basically paid it's employees in stock options until a few years ago.
I think 24 years was the minimum he could receive under the counts he was convicted of, he could have gotten a lot more. A lot of people who lost money in the fall of Enron weren't idiots, they were operating under false information. Their own CEO was telling them to stay in and buy more...as the board was selling out. I personally lost a sh*tload of cash from Enron's fall. I was well diversified but it was still very painfull. I was not stupid, it was not my fault. I owned Enron Preferred @around 8 1/2% I think. The only way my investment would go worthless is if Enron went bankrupt, whatever cashflow they had they had to pay me first. Trust me there was never any indication given by the management of Enron that they had leveraged themselves to the point where thay could be at risk of bankruptcy. They owned pipelines for god's sake, they are practically a freaking utility. No they lied and covered up their greed. Some sentences are handed down as a message. They may seem overly harsh but they are intended to make people think twice before they commit the same types of cimes in the future; particularly crimes with extreme consequences and that are difficult to prosecute. It is a fairly common tenet of American jurisprudence. The foundation of trillions of dollars of American business depends on the fairness of information the public sector has to make infromed decisions with. Now I've already been burned enough that I won't trust it and don't currently own any common stocks, but if everyone felt that way the crash of '29 would pale at the effect.
You have it quite wrong. Fastow was the thief (stealing from investors, banks, and Enron itself) and he walks away with a sweetheart 7 year deal. Skilling was an incompetent CEO and he gets 24 years. That's not right.
Uh, don't know where you heard this, but they did give options and a lot of MS employees got rich, but they still paid their people. And, yes, I know he encouraged people to put all their holding into Enron stock....BUT....only a fool would do that. DD
