[srmom]

That's true, but I will tell you that to this day, Jeff Skilling and his family think that he was innocent of the charges brought against him. He and his family strongly feel that the deals and dealings that drove Enron off the cliff were legal and that he will one day be exonerated.

Here's an interesting quote from a book written about this:

The implications of the Enron debacle were so vast that even years in hindsight, they are still coming into view. It set off what became a cascading collapse in public confidence, sealing the final days of an era of giddy markets and seemingly painless, riskless wealth. Soon Enron appeared to be just the first symptom of a disease that had somehow swept undetected through corporate America, felling giants in its wake from WorldCom to Tyco, from Adelphia to Global Crossing. What emerged was a scandal of scandals, all seemingly interlinked in some mindless spree of corporate greed.

As investors fled the marketplace, terrified of where the next eruption might emerge, trillions of dollars in stock values vanished, translating into untold numbers of second jobs, postponed retirements, lost homes, suspended educations, and shattered dreams.

But nothing was quite what it appeared. The Enron scandal did not burst out, fully grown, from the corporate landscape in a matter of days. Across corporate America, widespread corner cutting, steadily falling standards, and compromised financial discipline had been festering for close to a decade. Warnings about funny numbers, about unrealistic expectations, about the coming pain of economic reality, went unheeded as investors celebrated corporations pursuing reckless or incomprehensible business strategies that helped their stock prices defy the laws of gravity.

And:

Shocking incompetence, unjustified arrogance, compromised ethics, and an utter contempt for the market’s judgment all played decisive roles. Ultimately, it was Enron’s tragedy to be filled with people smart enough to know how to maneuver around the rules, but not wise enough to understand why the rules had been written in the first place.

No single person bore responsibility for the debacle; no single person possibly could. Instead, the shortcomings of a handful of executives—along with a community of bankers, lawyers, and accountants eager to win the company’s fees; a government willing to abide absurdly lax rules; and an investor class more interested in quick wealth than long-term rewards—merged to create an enterprise destined to fail. But in the end, for all the mind-numbing accounting ploys and financial maneuvers that came to light in Enron’s wake, the underlying cause of the collapse was fairly simple: the company spent much of its money on lousy businesses. And the market exacted its revenge.

Sound familiar??