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In Last Day of Cross-Examination, Skilling Goes Out Fighting
Jeffrey K. Skilling, former chief executive of Enron Corp., with lawyer Daniel Petrocelli, rear. Skilling has been testifying in his fraud trial for seven days.
(By F. Carter Smith -- Bloomberg News)
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On cross-examination, Skilling displayed another side of his personality. Skilling had developed a reputation for bristling under criticism -- and that came across in full force Wednesday.
As Berkowitz read aloud from a March 2001 Fortune magazine article that questioned Enron's earnings growth and its prospects, Skilling interjected, "You chose the unfavorable one, right? Just curious."
He followed his own question, asking the prosecutor: "Are you entering this as truth or just as what people are saying?"
At that point, U.S. District Judge Simeon T. Lake III intervened with a comment for the witness. "I gave a long, thorough instruction last week. Apparently you don't remember. I hope the jury does."
The incident was one of several in which Skilling tried to wrest control of the proceeding, which led the prosecutor to restrict him to yes-or-no responses. They clashed repeatedly Wednesday over a method Enron used to express the risks of trading operations, risks that prosecutors argue were never properly disclosed to investors. Skilling said analysts "absolutely had those numbers," known as "value at risk."
After more than an hour of frustrating back-and-forth exchanges, Berkowitz moved on, playing a call from Skilling to employees of the investment firm Alliance Capital in August 2001. Alliance held nearly 20 million Enron shares at the time and bought 13 million more shortly before the company fell apart. Prosecutors used the call to demonstrate that the risk-measurement concept was not easy for many people to understand -- including investors and employees who lost retirement savings.
Government lawyers ended their questioning Wednesday where it all began: the reasons for Skilling's abrupt resignation, which triggered increased scrutiny of Enron by investors and analysts. Prosecutors argued Wednesday that he was considering other top jobs, including a chief executive post at Lucent Technologies Inc., after saying he had left for personal reasons, unaware Enron was on the verge of disaster.
That, too, drew Skilling's ire. He called the argument yet another "misrepresentation," as prosecutors declared they were finished with him.
