From Holden:
Peter O’Toole is my all-time favorite pornstar-name-for-someone-who-is-not-a-pornstar, but Linda Lay is Number 2 with a bullet. Today it looks like the Enron Task Force is going to give Ken Lay’s wife a Martha Stewart makeover.
Federal prosecutors are investigating whether the wife of former Enron chairman Ken Lay illegally sold shares in the company just before it filed for bankruptcy protection, a lawyer for the couple said Wednesday.
The Department of Justice’s Enron Task Force is investigating whether Linda Lay engaged in insider trading in the sale of 500,000 shares of Enron stock on Nov. 28, 2001, through the Lay’s charitable foundation, according lawyer Michael Ramsey.
The sale took place after a credit-rating cut was issued for Enron’s debt, Ramsey said, but before trading in the stock was halted when it was announced a proposed buyout by rival Dynegy had fallen apart.
The stock was sold for about $2.36 a share, and all money went to charitable organizations that had been promised pledges by the Lay’s foundation, he said.
Enron, whose stock fell 85% that day to 61 cents, collapsed into bankruptcy less than a week later, prompting a flurry of lawsuits and criminal charges.
[snip]
Linda Lay tearfully told a television interviewer in January 2002 the couple was near bankruptcy. She opened a second-hand shop to sell the couple’s unwanted furnishings but closed it earlier this year.
I wonder, though, if the prosecutors really care about Linda Lay and her insider trading, or if they have bigger fish to fry. A fish our preznit knows as Kennyboy.
Prosecutors charged the wife of former Enron chief financial officer Andrew Fastow with filing false tax returns in what legal observers said was an attempt to persuade her husband to strike a plea deal.
Fastow agreed in January to a deal that will send him to prison for 10 years in exchange for his cooperation in the cases against Lay, former chief executive Jeff Skilling and former chief accounting officer Richard Causey.
Fastow’s wife, Lea, is currently serving a one-year sentence after striking a deal with the government to reduce the charges.