Guilty, Guilty, Guilty

Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling are guilty, now a matter of public record.

The conspiracy and fraud convictions each carry a sentence of 5 to 10 years in prison.

For a company that once seemed so complex that almost no one could understand its arcane accounting or how it actually made its money, the cases ended up being nearly as simple as could be. Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling were found guilty of lying — lying to investors, to employees and to government regulators — in an effort to disguise the crumbling fortunes of their energy empire.

For Mr. Lay and Mr. Skilling, the convictions represent a legal judgment about what went wrong with their transformation of a once-sleepy natural gas pipeline company into an energy-trading dynamo that at one point achieved the status of the nation's seventh-largest corporation.

Who knew justice would come through? Now it will be all about the appeals and presidential pardon.

Tags: Enron, Ken Lay, Skilling, guilty