After 12 years in prison over the infamous Enron fraud scandal, the company’s former CEO Jeffrey K. Skilling is a free man.
He was released Thursday after locating last August at a halfway house at an undisclosed site from a minimum security federal prison camp in Alabama.
Skilling was sentenced to 24 years in prison and fined $45 million over the Houston company’s bankruptcy. The Enron collapse cost billions of dollars for investors and the jobs of thousands of workers.
Skilling, now 65, was convicted in 2006 of 12 counts of securities fraud, five counts of lying to auditors, one count of insider trading and one count of conspiracy. The convictions came after he hid the company’s debt and orchestrated a web of financial fraud.
(Skilling before he went to prison)
His sentence and fine were the harshest sentence of any of the former Enron executives. A Houston federal judge decided six years ago to reduce Skilling’s sentence to 14 years.
Enron chairman Kenneth Lay went on trial at the same time as Skilling and was found guilty of wire fraud, securities fraud, bank fraud and making false statements to banks. But Lay, who founded Enron in 1985 by merging two natural gas pipeline companies, was never sentenced because he died of an apparent heart attack while free on bond.
