"Kenny Boy" Lay turned himself in today
(The New York Times)

"Kenneth L. Lay, the former chairman and chief executive of Enron, turned himself in to the Federal Bureau of Investigation in Houston today after he was charged on Wednesday in a sealed indictment by a federal grand jury examining the financial fraud that led to the collapse of the onetime energy giant.

The charges are the culmination of almost three years of investigation against Mr. Lay, who has said he has done nothing wrong. The indictment was delivered by prosecutors to a federal magistrate and is expected to be unsealed today, when the specific charges will become known."

[Update The federal indictment adds 11 counts against Lay to charges already filed against his hand-picked protege, former CEO Jeffrey Skilling, and former top Enron accountant Richard Causey.
It accuses Lay of participating in a conspiracy to manipulate Enron's quarterly financial results. It also accuses him of making public statements about Enron's financial performance that were false and misleading and omitting facts necessary to make financial statements accurate and fair.
In a separate action, the Securities and Exchange Commission led civil charges Thursday against Lay, accusing him of fraud and insider trading and seeking recovery of more than $90 million in what the agency said were illegal proceeds from stock sales.]


The Mind Boggles:

Delving into the whole Enron story is a little daunting, so I've highlighted a few interesting aspects of the influence and connections and crimes of the company and you can go from there.

Dabhol plant

Of course, there's Enron's Dabhol plant in India for one thing. The Bush administration put a lot of pressure on the Indian governemnt to play ball with Kenny Boy. Seems an Indian governor was getting a little uppity about paying off a debt to Enron:

(Free Republic)
"A series of e-mail memos obtained by the Washington Post and NY Daily News in January revealed that the National Security Council led a "Dabhol Working Group" composed of officials from various Cabinet departments during the summer of 2001. The memos suggest that the Bush Administration was running exactly the sort of "war room" that was a favorite subject of ridicule by Republicans during the Clinton years.

The Working Group prepared "talking points" for both Cheney and Bush and recommended that the need to "broaden the advocacy" of settling the Enron debt. Every development was closely monitored: "Good news" a NSC staff member wrote in a e-mail memo: "The Veep mentioned Enron in his meeting with Sonia Gandhi." The Post commented that the NSC went so far that it "acted as a sort of concierge service(20) for Enron Chairman Kenneth L. Lay and India's national security adviser, Brajesh Mishra" in trying to arrange a dinner meeting between the Indian official and Lay."

Centgas Pipeline

Oh yes, and then there is that pesky "CentGas pipeline" which rolls into the Dabhol plant and the Taliban. See below regarding Zalmay Khalizad. (He drew up the plans for the pipeline)

From alternet.org

1: Starting in the mid-1990s, Unocal and its partners planned to build a 1,000 mile gas pipeline from Turkmenistan to Multan, Pakistan. Cost: about $2 billion (all pipeline routes shown are very approximate). Also considered was a more difficult route from Iran to Multan, which is not shown here.
2: A proposed 400-mile extension from Multan to New Delhi would bring some of the ultra-cheap gas into India's network of gas pipelines. Cost: $600 million.
3: The HBJ pipeline carries most of India's liquid natural gas.
4: Hazira, north of Bombay, is the end of the HBJ pipeline. But in 1997, Enron announced plans to link Dabhol to the Hazira terminal. Enron also said they were going to add to about 1500 miles to the HBJ pipeline. Costs: $300 million and $900 million, respectively.
5: Any gas pipeline across Pakistan could have a spur to the seaport of Gwadar, where tankers could take gas to Korea and Japan, largest consumers of liquid gas in the world. A sea route from Gwadar to Dabhol would be even easier.


"Although Unocal had the largest share, the "Central Asian Gas Pipeline" (CentGas) consortium had six other partners, including companies in Saudi Arabia's Delta Oil Company -- the next largest shareholder with 15 percent -- and groups in Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Pakistan, and Turkmenistan. They vowed to continue the project, and had strong national interests in seeing the Afghanistan pipeline built.

The U.S. looked for other options, and the Trade and Development Agency commissioned a feasibility study for an improbable east- to- west route that would cross the Caspian Mountains and end at a Mediterranean seaport in Turkey. The company hired for that study was Enron. If that pipeline were to be constructed, Turkmenistan signed an agreement that it would be built by Bechtel and GE Capital Services -- the same American companies that were Enron's business partners in the Dabhol power plant.
No matter which direction the Central Asia natural gas would eventually flow, Enron would profit."

Other Enron follies:

Beyond that whole twisted tale we get into Afghanistan, but for now, suffice to say Hamid Karzai, another Unocal employee, has signed the deal and the pipeline will be built.

James Baker III (He's the one representing the Saudis against the families of 9-11 victims.)

The prestigious Enron Prize

"Mikhail Gorbachev former president of the Soviet Union, will visit Houston Thursday, October 16, to accept the prestigious Enron Prize for Distinguished Public Service from the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy of Rice University. On hand during the ceremony will be former U.S. secretaries of state Henry Kissinger, Warren Christopher, Cyrus Vance and James A. Baker, III.

The Enron Prize is awarded to men and women who, through their personal and political courage, have made historic contributions to public service in both the domestic and foreign policy fields. Created in 1995 through an endowment from the Enron Corp., Gorbachev is the second recipient of the Enron Prize. The first recipient was General Colin Powell, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff."

Baker/Hughes

"What would you think the following may have in common? Ken Starr, James A. Baker III (who is a former, Sec. of State, Sec. of the Treasury, and twice White House Chief of Staff under Presidents Reagan and Bush), Enron (formerly Hughes Tool), Hughes Aircraft, Hughes Electronics, and Howard Hughes Medical Institute? How about fraud, billions of dollars in estate tax fraud, corruption, satellite and missile technologies transfers, the "China-Hughes" Conspiracy, and even
including arming Sadaam Hussein in Oct. 1989, and doing so by charging the U.S. taxpayers well over $1 billion dollars to do it?"

(This whole Baker/Hughes connection is mind boggling. Do check the link above out!)

Go to Baker/Hughes web site to for links to all its companies. You'll be amazed.

But probably not by this...

Who cuts up the pie?

"Simply getting Iraq's oil fields back to their pre-1991 production of about 3.5 million barrels a day will take at least 18 months and cost about $5 billion initially, with another $3 billion in annual operating expenses, according to the Baker Institute study.

If the U.S. government is handing out the contracts for this job, the biggest beneficiaries, according to Banc of America Securities energy analyst Jim Wicklund, would be Dallas-based Halliburton (HAL: Research, Estimates), Baker Hughes Inc. (BHI: Research, Estimates), Weatherford International Inc. (WFT: Research, Estimates) and Schlumberger Ltd. (SLB: Research, Estimates) -- in that order.

All of them are oilfield service companies with the expertise to rebuild Iraq's fields." [Hmmm...]

More Enron follies:

Ralph Reed:(Washington Post)

Just before the last presidential election, Bush campaign adviser Ralph Reed offered to help Enron Corp. deregulate the electricity industry by working his "good friends" in Washington and by mobilizing religious leaders and pro-family groups for the cause.

For a $380,000 fee, the conservative political strategist proposed a broad lobbying strategy that included using major campaign contributors, conservative talk shows and nonprofits to press Congress for favorable legislation. Reed said he could place letters from community leaders in the opinion pages of major newspapers, producing clips that Reed would "blast fax" to Capitol Hill.

"We are a loyal member of your team and are prepared to do whatever fits your strategic plan," Reed wrote in an Oct. 23, 2000, memo obtained by The Washington Post.

"In public policy," he wrote, "it matters less who has the best arguments and more who gets heard -- and by whom."

Last month Judicial Watch, a conservative watchdog group, asked for a federal investigation into whether Rove arranged the 1997 Enron contract to avoid paying Reed from Bush campaign funds. Others have questioned whether the Bush camp had hoped to ensure Reed's allegiance during the early days of the campaign.

He claims credit for helping Bush win several key presidential primary victories, and he has served as an adviser to members of Congress. Since 1997, when Reed opened Century Strategies, his consulting clients have included political candidates and corporations with interests in Washington. He dropped Microsoft Corp. as a client in 2000 after charges that he had lobbied Bush on behalf of the software company while Bush was governor of Texas."

And then there was the "Lay-out:"((WSWS.org)

Wenonah Hauter, from the watchdog group Public Citizen, testified that Enron's subsidiaries acted in concert with one another so the giant energy trader could inflate prices. This occurred under the oversight of Thomas White, Bush's secretary of the army who is under pressure to resign because of his actions as an Enron executive.

"In the first three months of 2001 at the height of skyrocketing prices and rolling blackouts, White's division traded more than 11 million megawatts of electricity in the California market alone, making nearly 98 percent of these trades," Hauter said. At the same time, she said, "Enron divisions set astronomical prices up to $2,500 a megawatt hour [the standard price at the time was less than $340 a megawatt hour].

By selling power to itself at inflated prices, Enron helped skyrocket prices in California's deregulated market."

Naturally, there is much, much more, but time and space don't permit.