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Ken Lay: The Legacy

Posted Wednesday, July 5, 2006, at 6:02 PM ET

Ken Lay is dead, quite possibly of a broken heart. The founder and former chief executive of Enron Corp. had only two months earlier been convicted on six counts of fraud and one count of conspiracy and was looking, according to the Houston Chronicle, at somewhere between 12 and 25 years in the slammer.

Here is what Lay leaves behind. To read the footnotes in the document below and on the following two pages, roll your mouse over the passages highlighted in yellow. To read the original document, obtained from Enron's still-extant Web site, click here.

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Translation: The shares went poof! Technically, they were converted into shares in the "Common Equity Trust" and "Preferred Equity Trust" mentioned below. These shares are, for all practical purposes, worthless.
Not going to happen. Enron's potential liabilities are more than ten times the value of its assets.
A: When hell freezes over.
A: You will have read in your daily newspaper that hell has frozen over.

Posted Wednesday, July 5, 2006, at 6:02 PM ET
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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
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