Jeffrey Skilling gets 24 years

Enron's Skilling Is Sentenced to 24 Years

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By ALEXEI BARRIONUEVO
Published: October 24, 2006

HOUSTON, Oct. 23 ?- Jeffrey K. Skilling was sentenced to 24 years and 4 months in prison for his role in the pervasive fraud and conspiracy that led to the bankruptcy of Enron, closing the book on the government's prosecution of top executives at the once-highflying energy company.

Michael Stravato for The New York Times

Jeffrey K. Skilling, center, and his lawyer left federal court in Houston after Mr. Skilling was sentenced.

Enron's fall ushered in a wave of prosecutions against corruption at the highest levels of American business. Since then the Justice Department has tightened the tourniquet around high-level executives involved in white-collar crime, leading to a series of stiff prison sentences.

Mr. Skilling stood stoically in his black suit as Judge Simeon T. Lake III read his sentence, which narrowly missed being the longest one ever handed down to a white-collar criminal. That record still belongs to Bernard J. Ebbers, the former chief executive of WorldCom, who was sentenced to 25 years last year for his role in the $11 billion fraud that led to that company's collapse.

Mr. Skilling's sentence nevertheless amounts to almost life imprisonment for the 52-year-old former chief executive, who in one decade transformed Enron from a sleepy pipeline company into an energy-trading juggernaut. Accounting schemes he approved masked huge debt and cash flow problems at the company that led to its ultimate demise. Shareholders at Enron, once the seventh-largest company in the country, lost billions of dollars in stock and retirement savings.

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