HOUSTON (CN) – Jeffrey Skilling, the former Enron CEO whose role in the company’s accounting scandals sent him to prison for 12 years, was released Thursday to a halfway house at an undisclosed location.
Enron became synonymous with corporate fraud in 2001 when an investigation revealed the electricity generation and natural gas company had cooked its books to inflate profits.
Thousands of Enron employees lost their jobs when it filed for bankruptcy in December 2001, the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history, and many lost their life savings as the company’s share price tanked.
In May 2006, a federal jury convicted Skilling of 19 of 28 criminal counts of securities fraud, insider trading, making false statements to auditors, insider trading and conspiracy.
He was sentenced to 24 years in prison and fined $45 million, after spending $40 million on his defense.
The U.S. Supreme Court vacated part of his conviction in 2010 and he made a deal with federal prosecutors in 2013 that cut his sentence from 24 to 14 years.
Skilling, 64, did his time at a minimum security prison camp in Montgomery, Ala.
A Bureau of Prisons assistant reentry manager in San Antonio told the Houston Chronicle the bureau would not disclose where it sent Skilling.
Skilling, a Harvard Business School graduate, sold $60 million worth of Enron shares shortly after resigning as its CEO in August 2001.
Ken Lay, Enron’s founder, died in 2006 while awaiting sentencing for 10 counts of securities fraud.
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