After more than three months of testimony from 55 witnesses, the fate of former Enron executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay was handed to a jury on Wednesday.
The government had its last chance to sway the eight women and four men before they were excused to begin deliberations.
For two hours on Wednesday morning, prosecutor Sean Berkowitz strenuously rebutted the defence team’s six hours of often derisive closing arguments on Tuesday.
“They have mocked this case,” he said. “They have said it was fictional but we didn’t make this case up.”
Reminding jurors of the testimony of nine former Enron employees who implicated the defendants, Berkowitz said “We didn’t go to central casting and come up with these people.”
The defence contends that these witnesses were coerced to lie.
“The only incentive they had was to tell the truth,” he said. “Not a single person we put up there wasn’t corroborated by other documents or other testimony.”
Skilling is charged with 28 counts of fraud and conspiracy and Lay is charged with six. The two men led Enron in the months prior to the energy company’s spectacular collapse in 2001.
It was then the biggest corporate bankruptcy in history, precipitated by revelations that the company had used questionable accounting and arcane financing vehicles to hide an estimated $40-billion in debt.
This case is widely seen as a test of the government’s crackdown on corporate corruption and could help restore investors’ faith in financial disclosures. — AFP