Jeffrey Skilling gets 10 years sliced off his sentence
The disgraced Enron chief executive officer Jeffrey Skilling has been in jail since 2006. This week 10 years has been cut off his 24 year jail sentence and now, after agreeing to pay £27 million to victims of his company’s collapse, he could be out by the end of the decade.
Convicted on 19 counts of securities fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors, this shady businessman has pulled off quite a stunt in a manoeuvre he’s been working on since 2009.
Skilling’s original sentence has previously been described by CNBC’s John Carney and Jeff Cox as “one of the harshest sentences ever handed down for a white-collar crime”. The duo have also been at pains to point out that he got “13 more years than Al Capone”.
What these apologists don’t remember is the damage, as pointed out by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that Skilling and his cronies Andrew Fastow and Kenneth Lay did:
“For Houstonians, Enron’s collapse was an event of once-in-a-generation proportions. Not only was the volume of media coverage immense and frequently intemperate, but the sheer number of victims created a climate in which animosity toward Skilling ran deep and the desire for his conviction was widely shared”.
As part of the deal Skilling struck he will not be entitled to appeal again. Having denied his crimes until now, finally, this crook has had to accept what he truly is.
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