Andrew Stuart "Andy" Fastow is a convicted felon and former financier who was the chief financial officer of Enron Corporation, an energy trading company based in Houston, Texas, until he was fired shortly before the company declared bankruptcy. Fastow was one of the key figures behind the complex web of off-balance-sheet special purpose entities used to conceal Enron's massive losses in their quarterly balance sheets. By unlawfully maintaining personal stakes in these ostensibly independent ghost-entities, he was able to defraud Enron out of tens of millions of dollars.
Obstruction of justice, in United States jurisdictions, is an act that involves unduly influencing, impeding, or otherwise interfering with the justice system, especially the legal and procedural tasks of prosecutors, investigators, or other government officials. Common law jurisdictions other than the United States tend to use the wider offense of perverting the course of justice.
The term "white-collar crime" refers to financially motivated, nonviolent or non-directly violent crime committed by individuals, businesses and government professionals. It was first defined by the sociologist Edwin Sutherland in 1939 as "a crime committed by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of their occupation". Typical white-collar crimes could include wage theft, fraud, bribery, Ponzi schemes, insider trading, labor racketeering, embezzlement, cybercrime, copyright infringement, money laundering, identity theft, and forgery. White-collar crime overlaps with corporate crime.
Jeffrey Keith Skilling is an American businessman who is best known as the CEO of Enron Corporation during the Enron scandal. In 2006, he was convicted of federal felony charges relating to Enron's collapse and eventually sentenced to 24 years in prison. The US Supreme Court heard arguments in the appeal of the case March 1, 2010. On June 24, 2010, the Supreme Court vacated part of Skilling's conviction and transferred the case back to the lower court for resentencing.
"The idiot defense" is a satirical term for a legal strategy where a defendant claims innocence by virtue of having been ignorant of facts of which the defendant would normally be expected to be aware. Other terms used for this tactic include "dumb CEO defense", "dummy defense", "ostrich defense", "Ken Lay defense", and "Sergeant Schultz defense". The first known instance of the idiot defense was by John Henry Stafford, a lawyer in Jackson, Tennessee who was also known as Yankee John. He used it in the defense of Marlin Heady, a moonshiner. The charges were all, allegedly, dropped.
Nancy Anne Temple is an attorney specializing in accounting liability. She was the in-house attorney for Arthur Andersen, who advised Michael Odom and David B. Duncan about Arthur Andersen policies regarding retention of documents from client engagements. Duncan oversaw the shredding of Arthur Andersen documents concerning their work for client Enron, between October 22 and November 9, 2001. A memo from Nancy Temple played a key role in the conviction of Arthur Andersen on charges of obstruction of justice. That conviction was later overturned.
The trial of Kenneth Lay, former chairman and CEO of Enron, and Jeffrey Skilling, former CEO and COO, was presided over by federal district court Judge Sim Lake in 2006 in response to the Enron scandal.
Simeon Timothy Lake III is a Senior United States district judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of Texas. His notable trials include the trial of Enron Chairman Ken Lay and former Chief Executive Officer Jeff Skilling.
Kevin A. Ring is a former American attorney and congressional staffer; he served Republicans in both the House and the Senate, including U.S. Representative John T. Doolittle (R-CA). He also served as a counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee's Constitution, Federalism and Property Rights Subcommittee.
Kenneth Lee Lay was an American businessman who was the founder, chief executive officer and chairman of Enron. He was heavily involved in the eponymous accounting scandal that unraveled in 2001 into the largest bankruptcy ever to that date. Lay was indicted by a grand jury and was found guilty of 10 counts of securities fraud at trial. Lay died in July 2006 while vacationing in his house near Aspen, Colorado, three months before his scheduled sentencing. A preliminary autopsy reported Lay died of a heart attack caused by coronary artery disease. His death resulted in a vacated judgment.
The Enron scandal was an accounting scandal involving Enron Corporation, an American energy company based in Houston, Texas. Upon being publicized in October 2001, the company declared bankruptcy and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen – then one of the five largest audit and accountancy partnerships in the world – was effectively dissolved. In addition to being the largest bankruptcy reorganization in U.S. history at that time, Enron was cited as the biggest audit failure.
John Henry Durham is an American lawyer who served as the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut from 2018 to 2021. By April 2019, he had been assigned to investigate the origins of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. elections, and in October 2020 he was appointed special counsel for the Department of Justice on that matter.
Angel A. Cortiñas is an American lawyer and judge on the Florida Third District Court of Appeal. Angel A. Cortiñas is a shareholder and co-chair of the firm's Appellate practice group. He is also a member of the firm's Women's Leadership Forum. Angel served as an appellate judge on Florida's 3rd District Court of Appeal for more than 8 years. He reviewed civil and criminal appeals from trial courts, authoring over 500 appellate opinions. He also served as a trial judge, by Florida Supreme Court appointment, on civil and criminal jury trials.
Chuck Rosenberg is an American attorney. He formerly served as the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) and for the Southern District of Texas; as a senior FBI official on the staff of two FBI Directors; as Counselor to the Attorney General; as the Chief of Staff to the Deputy Attorney General; as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in EDVA in Norfolk and Alexandria; and as the former Acting Administrator of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
Andrew S. Boutros is an American lawyer, law professor, and former federal prosecutor best known for prosecuting corporate fraud and cybercrime cases. In 2015, the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association honored him with the National Prosecutorial Award, and he was also elected to the American Law Institute the same year. He is the Regional Chair of Dechert LLP's White Collar practice, where he is resident in the firm's Chicago and DC offices.
Leslie Ragon Caldwell is an American attorney, who served as the Assistant Attorney General for the Criminal Division of the United States Department of Justice from 2014 to 2017. She has spent the majority of her professional career handling federal criminal cases, as both a prosecutor and as defense attorney. Since September 2017, she has been a partner at the law firm of Latham & Watkins, resident in San Francisco and Silicon Valley, CA.
Andrew A. Weissmann is an American attorney. He was an Assistant United States Attorney from 1991 to 2002, where he prosecuted high-profile organized crime cases.
Anming Hu is a Chinese-Canadian who had worked as an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Biomedical Engineering at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville (UTK) from 2013 to February 2020 when he was charged with fraud, after which UT suspended him.
Michael A. Sussmann is an American former federal prosecutor and a former partner at the law firm Perkins Coie, who focused on privacy and cybersecurity law. Sussmann represented the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and retained CrowdStrike to examine its servers after two Russian hacker groups penetrated DNC networks and stole information during the 2016 U.S. elections.
Haoyang Yu is a Chinese American who started a semiconductor chip company, Tricon, in Lexington, Massachusetts in 2016. A local semiconductor company named Custom MMIC and a government contractor reported Tricon to the FBI, leading to an investigation of Yu based on national security grounds. The Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency (DCSA) believed based on the report by the contractor that Yu had "unsavory links to China." Although allegations of Yu's connections to China were never proven and dropped, Yu was arrested in June 2019 and ultimately charged with 19 federal charges. Some of the export control violation charges were found to have depended on chip control designations created after the start of the investigation, were never publicized, and dropped prior to the trial. Yu's wife, Yanzhi Chen, was also charged with fraud.
