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HOUSTON - Former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling entered a federal prison on Wednesday to begin serving a 24-year sentence for his crimes in the one of the most infamous corporate scandals in US history.
Skilling, 53, arrived at the Waseca Federal Correctional Institution in Minnesota shortly after noon, the prison said in a release.
Skilling, who has appealed his conviction on 19 counts of conspiracy, fraud and insider trading, will serve 292 months, the longest sentence of any former Enron employee linked to the 2001 downfall of the energy trader in the then-largest ever US bankruptcy.
Designated "low security" by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, the 1123-bed Waseca facility is a former university extension campus that is one security level higher than the minimum security "prison camps" where corporate offenders are often placed.
Skilling, who once bragged that Enron would be the "world's greatest company," received a one-day reprieve from the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled on Tuesday he could not remain free pending his challenge to his conviction.
He was convicted in May along with Enron founder and chairman Ken Lay, who died of a heart attack in July.
Skilling's arrival at prison just days after the five-year anniversary of Enron's bankruptcy filing on December 2, 2001, brings closer an end to one of the darkest chapters in American business history.
The company's collapse erased thousands of Enron employees' pensions and billions of dollars in investors' money. Nearly three dozen people have been prosecuted for links to the fraud, and once-mighty accounting firm Arthur Andersen crumbled because of its association with Enron's fraudulent accounting.
Even five years later, the effects of Enron are still present.
"The breadth and depth of the fraud was truly breathtaking, but the suffering on the part of the employees and retirees hasn't entirely gone away," said Lowell Peterson of law firm Meyer Suozzi, English & Klein, which represented Enron workers who lost their severance pay.
Although criminal cases for three British bankers and two former Enron internet executives are still scheduled to take place, only a shareholders' lawsuit remains on the court docket as the last major legal chapter in the Enron saga.
- REUTERS
