Intelligence chief Clapper to set up US surveillance review group

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday launched a review of whether the country uses optimally advancements in technology to protect its national security while preventing unauthorized disclosure and maintaining public trust.

Surveillance by the U.S. National Security Agency has been at the center of a privacy controversy after its former contractor, Edward Snowden, released in June certain documents that suggested large scale collection of phone metadata and information from the Internet by the agency.

Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper has been directed to form the new Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technologies, which is to brief Obama on its interim findings within 60 days of the establishment of the group. A final report and recommendations are to be submitted through Clapper to the president no later than Dec. 15.

The constitution of the body including the number of members it will have was not disclosed.

The review group "will assess whether, in light of advancements in communications technologies, the United States employs its technical collection capabilities in a manner that optimally protects our national security and advances our foreign policy while appropriately accounting for other policy considerations, such as the risk of unauthorized disclosure and our need to maintain the public trust," according to a memorandum on the White House website.

Obama said Friday that his administration will appoint an independent board to review the country's surveillance programs, and also add a privacy advocate to defend privacy in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when agencies ask the court for new surveillance orders. Obama also said he will work with the U.S. Congress to limit data collection by the NSA under the Patriot Act.

The U.S. National Security Agency "touches" about 1.6 percent of daily Internet traffic, of which only 0.025 percent is selected for review, the agency said in its defense in a brief on Friday.

Citing figures from an unnamed tech provider, the NSA said the Internet carries 1,826 petabytes of information per day, of which the agency's analysts in effect look at 0.00004 percent or "less than one part in a million." The agency said its total collection added up to an area smaller than a dime in the standard basketball court of global communications.

U.S. telecommunications providers are compelled by court order to provide NSA with metadata about telephone calls to, from or within the country, NSA said in the brief. The purpose of the collection, under the NSA's Business Records FISA program, is to identify the "U.S. nexus of a foreign terrorist threat to the homeland." But the government "cannot conduct substantive queries of the bulk records for any purpose other than counterterrorism," it added.

NSA said it is authorized under section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to target non-U.S. persons who are reasonably believed to be located outside the U.S. The controversial part, criticized by many rights groups, is that the communications of U.S. persons are sometimes incidentally acquired in targeting the foreign entities.

In those cases, approved minimization procedures, which control the acquisition, retention, and dissemination of any information of a U.S. person, are used to protect the privacy of that person, NSA said.

"We do not need to sacrifice civil liberties for the sake of national security; both are integral to who we are as Americans," the unsigned document stated.

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Yahoo confirms departure of media chief Mickie Rosen

Mickie Rosen, head of global media at Yahoo, who was responsible for properties including Yahoo News, Sports and Finance, is leaving the company effective Sept. 1, Yahoo revealed Monday in a regulatory filing.

The change was announced just hours after Yahoo disclosed the resignation of three board members: Daniel Loeb, Harry Wilson and Michael Wolf, effective July 31, bringing the size of the company's board down to seven. "The remaining directors are committed to revisiting the board's size and composition," Yahoo said in a statement. However, the two events are believed to be unrelated.

The board members' resignations were disclosed alongside Yahoo's announcement of its repurchase of 40 million shares of Yahoo common stock owned by hedge fund Third Point, at a purchase price of US$29.11 per share. Loeb is CEO at Third Point; the hedge fund had nominated Wilson and Wolf as Yahoo board members.

In a separate filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Yahoo said that Rosen, who had served as senior vice president, global media and commerce since 2011, would receive severance benefits specified in her existing agreement with the company. A Yahoo spokeswoman declined to comment further on Rosen's departure or provide information about a replacement.

Yahoo's media division includes multiple site properties that are critical to the company's business, such as Yahoo Sports, Yahoo Finance and Yahoo Video, which provides original, premium and third-party content that is distributed across Yahoo's network.

Since October, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has attracted more attention for a slew of small mobile acquisitions than for revamping Yahoo's media offerings. But video in particular is one of four key revenue opportunities the company expects to focus on in the immediate future, Mayer said last week during the company's second-quarter earnings call.

During the call, Mayer called video a primary area of investment over the next year, along with new products geared toward improving the company's display advertising revenue, which fell by 11 percent in the quarter.

Yahoo faces enormous pressure to reinvent itself and demonstrate its relevance to users who have flocked to rival Internet companies such as Facebook, Twitter and Google. Some industry analysts have characterized the company as a sinking ship, but the departures of board members Loeb, Wolf and Wilson and media chief Rosen are not connected, said Erik Gordon, associate director at the University of Michigan's Zell Lurie Institute for Entrepreneurial Studies.

"Loeb dumped two-thirds of his stock, and his guys left the board, because he thinks the chances of the stock price going up are too slim to justify the risk of having so much money in the company," Gordon said.

But Rosen left for her own reasons, including the fact that Yahoo's media team "are losing their independence," he said, adding that Mayer wants more direct control over the media business.

Yahoo's stock has risen more than 70 percent over the past year, though Mayer's tech-celebrity status and the company's stake in the profitable Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba have been key factors in its ascension, experts have said.

Formula One Chief Indicted on Bribery Charges

Kamran Jebreili/Associated Press Bernie Ecclestone, pictured in this April 19 photo, has been indicted on bribery charges.
Bernie Ecclestone, the 82-year-old Englishman who controls the commercial rights to the Formula One racing series, has been indicted in Germany in a seven-year-old bribery affair, it was announced on Wednesday in Munich.

News of the indictment, while expected for some time, adds one more subject, and a major one, to the problems faced by the Formula One community. Mr. Ecclestone is accused of paying a $44 million bribe to Gerhard Gribkowsky, a German banker who was responsible for helping the Bavarian state bank dispose of certain assets, including 47.4 percent of the shares of Formula One Holdings, of which Mr. Ecclestone is chairman.

The shares went to CVC, an British private equity firm, per Mr. Ecclestone’s wishes. He has openly admitted the payment, saying it was a fee for services, and not a bribe. Mr. Gribkowsky was sentenced to eight years by a German court for tax evasion as a result, and is currently serving that sentence.

The indictment adds to Formula One’s current list of challenges, not the least of which is the lack of a logical successor to Mr. Ecclestone. Although he has become a billionaire from the series, he has also elevated the incomes of practically everyone involved in the world championship.
A trial date has not yet been set.

Evidence of Huawei Spying, Former Intelligence Chief Says

Michael Hayden, also the former head of the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA), said in an interview with the paper that Huawei had "shared with the Chinese state intimate and extensive knowledge of the foreign telecommunications systems it is involved with".


"I think that goes without saying," he was quoted as saying.


The newspaper reported Hayden said intelligence agencies have hard evidence of spying activity by the world's No. 2 telecoms equipment maker. It did not detail that evidence.


Huawei, founded in 1987 by former People's Liberation Army officer Ren Zhengfei, has repeatedly denied being linked to the Chinese government or military or receiving financial support from either.


Hayden is a director of Motorola Solutions, which provides radios, smart tags, barcode scanners and safety products. Huawei and Motorola Solutions Inc had previously been engaged in intellectual property disputes for a number of years.


Huawei Global Cyber Security Officer John Suffolk described the comments made by Hayden as "tired, unsubstantiated defamatory remarks" and challenged him and other critics to present any evidence publicly.

"Huawei meets the communication needs of more than a third of the planet and our customers have the right to know what these unsubstantiated concerns are," Suffolk said in a statement emailed to Reuters. "It's time to put up or shut up."


The report came a day after Britain announced it would review security at a cyber centre in southern England run by Huawei to ensure that the British telecommunications network is protected.


In October 2012, the U.S. House of Representatives' Intelligence Committee urged American firms to stop doing business with Huawei and ZTE Corp., warning that China could use equipment made by the companies to spy on certain communications and threaten vital systems through computerized links.


The Australian government has barred Huawei from involvement in the building of its A$37.4 billion ($34.25 billion) National Broadband Network. 

Bits Blog: SoftBank Chief Hints at More Price Cuts for Sprint

Franck Robichon/European Pressphoto Agency Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chief executive, has been behind a sharp decline in prices for broadband and cellphone services in Japan.

  Sprint’s new unlimited wireless plan, announced last week after its $21.6 billion acquisition by Japan’s SoftBank, did not deliver the aggressive price cuts that some analysts had expected.
But cheaper plans could be coming.

In a phone interview, Masayoshi Son, SoftBank’s chief executive, hinted that further price cuts could be in the works as the company invests to upgrade Sprint, America’s No. 3 wireless carrier.

“We will be aggressive in technology, price packages, services on every front,” Mr. Son said from California on Wednesday. “At the same time, we will improve the network to be the world’s best,” he said.
SoftBank, the Tokyo-based Internet and mobile communications giant, has a reputation in Japan for undercutting rivals on price to gain market share. Mr. Son has been behind a sharp decline in prices for broadband and cellphone services in Japan.

Expectations are high that Mr. Son will bring that strategy to Sprint, which has struggled with subscriber defections for years and that Mr. Son will inject healthy dose of competition to America’s mobile industry.
But Sprint’s price cuts have not been particularly groundbreaking, and executives have said the cuts were in the works before the SoftBank acquisition.

Under Sprint’s new wireless plan, customers pay $80 a month for unlimited data, texting and calling, down from the $110 Sprint had charged for a similar pricing.

“This is not the ‘magic behind the black curtain’ moment that many were waiting for with SoftBank,” Jennifer M. Fritzsche, senior analyst at Wells Fargo Securities, wrote in a research note on July 12.
Sprint remains under pressure from T-Mobile USA, the No. 4 wireless network, which has been offering a $70 package for unlimited talk, text and data from earlier this year.

Verizon, the industry leader, offers a shared data plan with unlimited talk and text messages for $90 a month, while AT&T, the No. 2 network, has a similar plan for $85.

Mr. Son has said that he planned to invest $16 billion in Sprint over the next two years to shake off competition from T-Mobile while also closing the gap with Verizon and AT&T.

Most of that investment will be spent on base stations for Sprint’s advanced LTE network, he told the Nikkei newspaper earlier this month.

And if SoftBank’s past antics in Japan are a clue, Mr. Son could also start driving down prices.

New Intel chief sees $150 Atom tablets this year

Upcoming Atom chips from Intel will appear in tablets priced as low as US$150, the company's CEO said Wednesday, vowing that Intel will not get caught flat footed again by "the next big thing."

Intel's low-power Atom chips are vital to its plans to recover ground in the mobile PC market, where sales of traditional laptops are falling and Intel has largely ceded the tablet space to rivals like Samsung Electronics and Qualcomm.

Speaking on his first quarterly earnings call for Intel on Wednesday, new CEO Brian Krzanich acknowledged Intel's missteps and said it can't afford to be caught off guard again.

"We've not always lived up to the standard we've set for ourselves," Krzanich said, admitting that Intel was "slow to respond" to the tablet market. There will always be "another big thing," he said, and Intel must be constantly "scanning" for it.

In the meantime, it's betting on two mobile versions of Atom to help it recover lost ground. One is Bay Trail, which will appear in touch-screen hybrid and tablet PCs in the second half of this year, at price points Intel hasn't been able to reach before, according to Krzanich .

Bay Trail will be offered in tablets priced at "$199 and below," Krzanich said. "Some you'll see even lower -- $150, and below that, as we go through the holiday season," he said. It wasn't clear if the cheapest tablets will ship in North America and Europe, however, or only in developing markets like China.

The other important Atom chip for mobile is Merryfield, designed to give Intel a bigger foothold in the smartphone market. Merryfield will ship by the end of the year, Krzanich said -- sooner than an Intel executive suggested back at the Computex trade show in June, though an Intel spokeswoman said Wednesday there has been no change in plans.

The need for chips that consume less power means that Intel's Atom processors, originally developed for netbooks, are an increasingly vital part of its business. The upcoming Atom chips are based on its new Silvermont core, which can run both Windows and Android OSes. There's even an Atom processor for servers, designed to compete with low-power Arm-based servers like those being developed by Advanced Micro Devices.

Intel will start to move Atom more rapidly to its newest manufacturing processes, and treat it as an equal to its more traditional Core architecture, used in PCs and servers, Krzanich said. The newer manufacturing processes produce faster transistors that use less power.

Atom won't be the first chip to move onto Intel's most advanced 14 nanometer process, which starts to be used later this year. CFO Stacy Smith implied that the first 14 nanometer part will Broadwell, the codename for a shrink of its Haswell design that appears likely to arrive early next year.

Krzanich was asked by an analyst if there's a danger Bay Trail will cannibalize sales of Intel's more expensive Core processors. Krzanich said he thought there was not, but he stressed that not getting left out of a market altogether is more important.

"At the end of the day, the market will go where the market goes, and [its] better to have a product like Bay Trail ... than miss that market, which if you look over the past was more the case," he said.
New Haswell chips are also coming soon, and will appear in sub-$400, and, "in some cases" sub-$300 laptops, including clamshell, convertible and "2-in-1" designs, Krzanich said. He didn't give an exact timeframe.

The new products are all crucial to Intel's efforts to recover growth in a PC market that continues to decline. On Wednesday, the company reported a 29 percent fall in profits for the second quarter and trimmed its sales outlook for the year.


"The overall PC market for 2013 is expected to be weaker than we originally forecast at beginning of the year," Smith said on Wednesday's earnings call.

BlackBerry Chief Admits Release of New Phones in U.S. Was Flawed

But Mr. Heins, speaking at the company’s annual meeting, told investors BlackBerry just needed more time for a turnaround — and he again sought their patience.

Not everyone was biting. One shareholder, referring to one of the new phones, the BlackBerry Z10, told Mr. Heins: “My sense is that the rollout of the Z10 was a disaster.”

“Were we perfect at the launch?” Mr. Heins responded. “Probably not. Was it a disaster? I don’t think so.”

After more than two years of development, the new phones and their new operating system were supposed to give BlackBerry smartphones capabilities similar to those of phones made by Apple and Samsung, the dominant forces in the market. But hopes have vanished that the new phones would swiftly increase market share in the United States — now just 0.9 percent, according to a survey from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Late last month, BlackBerry said that it had shipped just 2.7 million of the new models, about a million fewer than analysts expected. That disappointing news set BlackBerry’s stock sharply downward and eliminated the possibility that the annual meeting would be a turnaround celebration.

When Mr. Heins introduced the company’s new phones in New York this year, he spoke to an excited crowd, a situation that was repeated at a meeting this spring with enthusiastic developers. But on Tuesday, when he faced a crowd of shareholders and questions about the weak sales of those phones, the reception was far more muted.

And maybe that is the best he could have hoped for. A few weeks ago, when the shipment numbers were released, the company also reported an $84 million loss in the latest quarter. BlackBerry shares still have not recovered — and a chorus of harsh questions about the direction of the business have not gone away.

Mr. Heins again warned investors to expect more losses during the current quarter, while the company increases its spending on marketing and other promotions for the new BlackBerry 10 line of phones. And although the company has spent the last two years saying the phones were the centerpiece to its future, Mr. Heins repeatedly said on Tuesday that “we are not a devices-only company,” and he outlined his hopes for growth in its data services business.

He attributed the disappointing reception for BlackBerry 10 to the United States market.

“It is really a challenge in the U.S.,” Mr. Heins said at the meeting, which was webcast from the University of Waterloo in Ontario. When another shareholder asked him why the company had been unable to win over American investors, particularly ones based in New York, he said: “I would absolutely admit that this is an uphill battle.”

Richard Piasentin, the managing director of sales and marketing for the United States, left BlackBerry last month, Adam Emery, a spokesman for the company, said on Tuesday.

Some of problems with the BlackBerry 10 release seemed more related to the products than to advertising or lack of prominence in carriers’ stores, which had been cited as problems.

Some buyers of the Q10, a model that includes BlackBerry’s signature keyboard, have said they were disappointed to discover that it initially could not synchronize calendar and contact information with corporate systems that use Microsoft Outlook. Others discovered mail syncing issues that they had not had with previous BlackBerrys. And although BlackBerry continues to expand the apps offered for the phone, many important ones are missing, and assessments of their overall quality are mixed.

Among the disappointed was Mark R. McQueen, the president and chief executive of Wellington Financial in Toronto. While Mr. McQueen is a BlackBerry loyalist, his frustration with the Q10 became so great that he wrote two detailed posts enumerating its problems on his blog, which is widely followed in Canada’s financial community. He wrote that the phone’s shortcomings had prompted him to sell his BlackBerry shares at a loss.

“The sad reality is that BlackBerry management has failed to deliver on the incredibly modest expectations of someone who has held shares in the company, on and off, since the late 1990s,” Mr. McQueen wrote.

Many technology reviewers praised several features of the new phones. Mike Gikas, the senior editor for electronics at Consumer Reports, said the new phones were “pretty good but they don’t have the pizazz of top-shelf performers. No one’s dying for these phones.”

He said that whenever he was asked for his thoughts about the new BlackBerrys, “the next question is: ‘Do you think they’re going to be around?’ And that’s a consideration for people on a two-year contract.”

Chief Leaves Barnes & Noble After Losses on E-Readers

William Lynch Jr., the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, resigned on Monday, two weeks after a devastating earnings report that accentuated the bookseller’s losing battle against powerful rivals like Amazon.

Mr. Lynch’s departure was part of a series of sweeping changes the company announced as it tries to regain its footing after a failed initiative to build up its Nook division and compete in the increasingly crowded market for e-readers. When it revealed its fourth-quarter earnings late last month, Barnes & Noble said it would cease making its own color tablets, an acknowledgment that they were lagging popular brands like Amazon’s Kindle Fire and Apple’s iPad.

Instead, the company said it would form partnerships with third parties to make the color devices, while it continued to make and sell its own black-and-white versions of the Nook.

In a statement late Monday, the company said that Michael P. Huseby had been appointed chief executive of the Nook division and president of Barnes & Noble. Mr. Huseby has served as chief financial officer since joining Barnes & Noble in March 2012; previously he held that position at Cablevision Systems, a media company.

Max J. Roberts, the chief executive of the college division, will report to Mr. Huseby, while Mr. Huseby and Mitchell S. Klipper, the chief executive for the retail stores, will report to Leonard Riggio, the company’s chairman.

The moves on Monday appeared to be a step toward separating the digital and retail divisions, as the company has indicated it might do. Barnes & Noble has been in talks over a potential sale of its digital assets, as well as its 675 bookstores.

Microsoft is one potential buyer of the Nook business; last year it invested hundreds of millions of dollars to acquire 17.6 percent of the division.

Mr. Riggio has expressed interest in taking back ownership of the physical stores that make Barnes & Noble the largest bookstore chain in the country. Mary Ellen Keating, a spokeswoman for Barnes & Noble, declined to provide an update on that offer.

There was no indication that a new chief executive would be named.

“Because the company is in a transition period, we have no immediate plans to name a C.E.O.,” Ms. Keating said.

“We thank William Lynch for helping transform Barnes & Noble into a leading digital content provider and for leading in the development of our award-winning line of Nook products,” Mr. Riggio said in a statement issued Monday. “As the bookselling industry continues to undergo significant transformation, we believe that Michael, Mitchell and Max are the right executives to lead us into the future.”

The financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter underscored the urgency of the need to take action. The Nook unit showed a $177 million loss in earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization, or Ebitda, more than doubling the loss from the period a year earlier. Sales fell 34 percent, to $108 million.

The signs have been ominous for the company since the beginning of the year, when it announced that sales for the nine-week holiday period in late 2012 had declined at both its bookstores and in the Nook unit.

Mr. Lynch joined Barnes & Noble in February 2009, with no previous experience in bookselling. He was executive vice president for marketing at HSN.com and also worked for Gifts.com.

At the time, his arrival was hailed as a forward-thinking move, since Mr. Lynch, a Texas native, was only 39 years old and fluent in e-commerce and technology. Within months, Barnes & Noble introduced its first Nook e-reader.

To publishers, Mr. Lynch had performed a temporary miracle, helping create a product that provided a welcome competitor to Amazon’s Kindle, which dominated the market and offered e-books at a relatively inexpensive price.

The Nook was initially successful, drawing critical praise and capturing consumers who were uneasy about buying an e-reader — at the time a brand-new device — online, without testing it out in person. Barnes & Noble’s hundreds of retail stores allowed potential customers to see and touch what they were buying.

But even though Barnes & Noble quickly gained a sizable piece of the e-book market, it was not enough to ward off Amazon. And as black-and-white e-readers gave way to multifunctional color tablets, Barnes & Noble found itself competing unsuccessfully against companies many times its size, like Amazon and Apple, that have had technology in their DNA from the start.

As chief executive, Mr. Lynch worked from the company’s Ninth Avenue office in Manhattan, across town from the Fifth Avenue building where Mr. Riggio keeps his office. Mr. Lynch threw his energies into the digital side of the business, taking far less of an interest in the retail stores, and frequently flew to Palo Alto to build up Barnes & Noble’s presence in Silicon Valley, where their e-readers are designed.

Mike Shatzkin, the founder and chief executive of the Idea Logical Company, a publishing consultant, said a split of the business could help stave off the company’s decline.

“The Nook business clearly is going to need some global investment to have any kind of chance at all, and it certainly looks possible that they will be better off separate than together,” Mr. Shatzkin said. “There’s a glide path to oblivion, and you can affect the speed of the decline. Nobody’s going to bring back a robust brick-and-mortar book business.”

Ex-Windows 8 chief agrees not to badmouth Microsoft, gets stock payout

Microsoft’s former head of Windows 8 development has agreed not to badmouth Microsoft or work for some of its competitors and in return will receive a payout for unvested stock in the company, according to a regulatory filing Wednesday.

The “retirement agreement” with Steven Sinofsky, who left Microsoft in November after leading the development of its Windows 8 OS and Surface tablet, is described by Microsoft in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Sinofsky has agreed to not compete with Microsoft by accepting a job at certain competitors, which were not named, or encouraging customers to move away from its products. He’s also agreed not to solicit Microsoft employees to work at other companies, not to “disparage” Microsoft and not to take part in any litigation against the company, the filing says.

In return, Microsoft will pay Sinofsky the value of his outstanding unvested stock options up to the start of Microsoft’s 2013 fiscal year, which began last July, and award him other stock compensation.

It didn’t provide a dollar figure for the agreement but it said Sinofsky had stock award agreements totaling 418,361 shares, which at Wednesday’s closing price would be worth $14.2 million.

Windows 8 marked a dramatic shift for Microsoft. In particular, it included a completely new touch interface intended to help Microsoft and its PC making partners compete better with Apple’s iPad and other tablets.

Some of the changes in the OS haven’t been received well by users, however, and Microsoft is updating the software with Windows 8.1, which will reinstate some features like the ability to boot straight to the Windows desktop instead of the new tile interface.

In a statement Wednesday, Microsoft said the stock award to Sinofsky was in part to recognize his long service at the company.

“Given Steven’s 23 years of strong service at Microsoft, which included leading teams that produced six versions of Office and two versions of Windows, the company will continue to provide him with the economic value of the stock awards he earned during his employment, similar to the retirement benefits we provide employees who work at least 15 years and retire at 55 or older,” Microsoft said.

The agreement also provides other considerations for Microsoft, including “a commitment that Steven will continue assisting with intellectual property litigation until January 1, 2017.”

Microsoft didn’t identify any lawsuits Sinofsky might currently be helping with and a spokesman declined to comment further. The statement could mean that Sinofsky will be available to assist with any lawsuits should they arise.

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Enron chief sentence cut to 14 years

21 June 2013 Last updated at 20:15 GMT  Skilling was originally jailed in 2006 for 24 years for his part in the Enron fraud The prison sentence for the former boss of scandal-hit Enron has been reduced on appeal from 24 to 14 years.

Jeffrey Skilling presided over Enron when it became embroiled in one of the biggest corporate frauds in US history.

In return for the more lenient sentence, Skilling, who has been in prison since 2006, has agreed to stop appealing against his conviction.

Thousands of workers lost their jobs and retirement savings when energy firm Enron collapsed in 2001.

The company's implosion came amid revelations executives had covered up the shoddy state of its finances with accounting trickery and shady business deals.

The agreement between Skilling and federal prosecutors also allows more than $40m (£26m) seized from him to be distributed to the victims of the Enron fraud.

His prison term is now set to expire in December 2020.

He was able to push for a sentence reduction after an appeals court ruled in 2009 that a sentencing guideline had not been correctly applied in the original trial.
Corporate collapse
Jeffrey Skilling worked for Enron for 20 years and was chief executive for just six months, leaving the company four months before bankruptcy.

A jury in Houston, Texas convicted him in May 2006 on 19 counts of securities fraud, conspiracy, insider trading and lying to auditors.

The jury also found his predecessor as chief executive, Kenneth Lay, guilty of fraud and conspiracy. Lay died in July 2006 of a heart attack.

Enron's former chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, testified against both Skilling and Lay and was sentenced to six years in prison.

He was released in December 2011. He declined to comment on Skilling's re-sentencing.

Enron was part of a series of corporate accounting scandals at the turn of the century that led directly to a raft of reforms, including the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002.