Skilling’s spiral

Further to the subject of shareholders paying for the executive lifestyle, we note wire service reports that another executive whose fun-seeking was heavily financed by shareholders’ money, Jeffrey Skilling, has been taken into custody by New York’s finest and deposited at one of the many friendly branches of New York Presbyterian Hospital for observation.

Police sources told the Associated Press that Skilling, feeling the effects of refreshment, had pulled open the clothing of patrons at two New York bars, shouting, “You’re an FBI agent and you’re following me.” (Perhaps a Calvinist hospital was a fortunate choice.)

Skilling, readers will recall, is the former chief executive officer at Enron Corp., the utilities company that turned into a massive trader of commodities and everything else before imploding in 2001’s highest-profile accounting scandal. United States prosecutors have charged him, and three other Enron executives, with securities fraud, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit securities fraud, and insider trading. The charges allege that Skilling and other Enron executives materially misled the public, credit rating agencies, and regulators about Enron’s financial position, in order to inflate its share price. (We might add here that there are no charges against him for misuse of company funds, as there are against another of that bad year’s corporate fall guys, former Tyco chief executive Dennis Kozlowski. Kozlowski, by the way, walked on April 2 after a mistrial was declared in his case, but prosecutors plan to reintroduce the charges.)

Columnist and business professor Paul Kedrosky suggested Skilling’s unusual behaviour might be preparing the ground for an insanity defence, after the manner of Genovese crime family boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante, who feigned insanity from the mid-1960s in an attempt to evade criminal charges. Noting that the bars were in sleepy Queens and the genteel Upper East Side, we take a broader view: perhaps he was simply hammered. Now if Skilling had tried that trick at some bars we know over on Ninth, that really would have been crazy.