Jeffrey Skilling: Enron roles, appeals and sentence

analysisSkilling served as president and chief operating officer before becoming CEO in February 2001 and resigning on 14 August. The Powers inquiry criticised his support for LJM and control failures, but identified disputed evidence about the March 2001 Raptor restructuring. Skilling denied approving that restructuring; the committee’s conditional account cannot be turned into an uncontested admission. ^{1 2}

analysisThe May 2006 jury convicted him on 19 counts and acquitted him on nine insider-trading counts. The district court initially imposed 292 months. In 2010 the Supreme Court rejected his Houston venue challenge but held that honest-services fraud reaches bribery and kickbacks, returning the case for further assessment rather than acquitting him on every count. ^{3 4 1}

analysisThe later sentence was 168 months under a 2013 agreement, with supervision and victim restitution. His separate SEC action ultimately produced summary judgment and a permanent public-company officer-and-director bar in December 2015. These later dispositions, rather than the original sentence alone, define the procedural endpoint described here. ⁵