"Once at the pinnacle of Houston's financial and political elite with a fortune worth as much as $400 million, Mr. Lay, the former chairman of the Enron Corporation, is now facing financial ruin." So reads the opening paragraph in Alexei Barrionuevo and Kurt Eichenwald's story in the Sunday, February 26, 2006, New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/business/26lay.html

That's tough. It seems to put Lay in the same boat with the thousands of Enron employees, the folks who had their 401(k) retirement plans invested in Enron stock. 

Sixty percent of the total plan assets consisted of Enron stock. For some employees, company stock accounted for 90 percent of their plan. When the Enron stock price plummeted to near zero, so did the value of their retirement funds.

It might sound like Lay and other former Enron employees have a lot in common.  Don't be fooled.

Back in early 2002, Ken's wife, Linda Lay, went on the Today show to say that her husband was a fine fellow who would never do anything wrong and that poor Ken was misled by others. She also said that she and Ken are "fighting for liquidity."

The problem was that she said all this while sitting in a palatial living room where the furnishings alone were probably worth more than what's left in the retirement accounts of most Enron employees.

Writing in the St. John's Law Review (http://new.stjohns.edu/academics/graduate/law/journals/lawreview/)
, law professor Susan J. Stabile, laid out the difference between senior Enron executives like Lay and most Enron employees. 

"There seems to be little question that employees were not privy to the same information about the company's true financial state that was available to senior executives, many of whom were selling a significant amount of their own shares even as they were continuing to tell employees what a good investment the company's stock represented."

Let me put this simply.  Ken Lay told Enron employees that things had never been better and that there were good times ahead. But he knew that the company was in desperate condition.

Key Lay was urging Enron employees to hold on to their stock but he was selling his.  He lied to buy time to make his personal situation better, while the company and the retirement plans of its employees went down the drain. In 2001, Enron corporate insiders bought less than $400,000 worth of stock. They sold stock worth almost $140 million.

Ken Lay was supposed to be a great leader. Part of a leader's job is to accomplish the mission.  The other part is to care for the people.  Ken Lay didn't do either one and for that he should suffer.

But more importantly, he lied to people who trusted him and believed him.  He saved what he could of his own fortune while he let clerks and secretaries and janitors lose what amounted to their life savings.

For that he should burn in a deep, nasty circle of hell.