Money & Politics

For the first time in the four-week trial of two former Enron executives, the actions of the company's directors in a critical month in 2001 came under scrutiny during a cross-examination. Read More

A lawyer for Jeffrey K. Skilling, a former Enron chief executive, tried Wednesday to portray the head of the company's broadband unit as an out-of-touch manager who was criticized for his free-spending ways and did not even know how many employees were working under him. Read More

High-ranking officials from the United States as well as Iraq accuse the Danish shipping company Maersk of having taken advantage of the chaos of war in order to grab control of Iraq's oil port. Read More

KENNETH L. LAY and his second in command, Jeffrey K. Skilling, were the public faces of Enron, painting a rosy picture of strong profits and healthy businesses. But as the facts began to tumble out, in the fall of 2001, the company swiftly collapsed, taking with it the fortunes and retirement savings of thousands of employees. Read More

"For the government, if they lose the Enron case, it will be seen as a symbolic failure of their rather significant campaign against white-collar crime," said John C. Coffee Jr., a professor at Columbia Law School. "It will be seen as some evidence that some cases are too complicated to be brought into the criminal justice process." Read More

CH2M Hill, a national company based in Denver, landed the deal for the collection and disposal of about 30,000 damaged and abandoned cars, trucks, buses and boats littering public streets and rights of way. Read More

Sean M. Berkowitz and a small group of government lawyers will be in the spotlight in the Jan. 30 trial of Enron's former leaders. The case is the capstone in the cleanup after an era of business misconduct that left investors billions of dollars poorer. The outcome could shape the public's -- and history's -- judgment of how effective it was. Read More

Government lawyers who will try the case against Enron's former chief executives, Kenneth L. Lay and Jeffrey K. Skilling, have signaled that they intend to spend less time befuddling jurors with talk of Enron's accounting. Read More

The nation's coal mines have been required to pay only a fraction of the federal fines imposed after deadly accidents since 1999, a USA TODAY analysis shows. Read More

The press has spilled plenty of ink writing about Jack Abramoff, the powerful Washington lobbyist at the center of an extensive corruption scandal. But little noticed is that among Mr. Abramoff's many clients was the press itself, at least part of it. In 2000, he represented the Magazine Publishers Association, and it turns out that some of the association's money may have been funneled to Mr. Abramoff's political allies. Read More