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Ex-Enron financial executive pleads
guilty |
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FORMER Enron Corp.
executive Michael Kopper pleaded guilty yesterday and became
the first to admit a criminal role in the energy giant’s
failure.Kopper, the chief lieutenant to disgraced former Chief
Financial Officer Andrew Fastow, will plead guilty to two
charges of conspiring to commit wire fraud and money
laundering and surrender US$12 million in “criminally derived”
assets, the sources said. The 37-year-old Kopper will
cooperate with prosecutors, the sources said. With his plea,
federal prosecutors leading the sprawling investigation into
Enron have snared a high-ranking insider in a position to
testify against Fastow and possibly other executives above
him. The plea may also alleviate public and congressional
pressure to produce results in the long-running investigation.
Although U.S. investigators have made several high-profile
arrests of top executives of other companies accused of
corporate wrongdoing, they had yet to charge anyone connected
to Enron. “Here the government is taking the traditional route
of applying tremendous pressure to individuals and striking
deals with carefully selected insiders who will lead them
through the Byzantine transactions,” said Mintz, who now leads
the white-collar criminal defense practice at the law firm of
McCarter & English in Newark, New Jersey. (SD-Agencies)
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