Kenneth Rice, a former chief executive officer of Enron Broadband Services (EBS), was ordered to forfeit approximately $15 million and sentenced to 27 months in prison.

According to US Justice Department the 15 million dollars will be paid to victims of the Enron’s collapse, who included employees and other shareholders.

Rice admitted that while he was at EBS, a unit of the now-defunct Enron Corp., he and others made a series of false statements about the products, services and business performance of EBS in order to mislead investors and others about the success of the company and to inflate artificially the price of Enron stock.

During his trial Kenneth Rice said that while serving as EBS’s CEO, he conspired with others to make false statements about the company’s development of various software capabilities and its fiber-optic network. EBS was portrayed as a commercial and business success, and Rice claimed that network control software developed by EBS was “up and running” – when in fact the software had not progressed beyond the internal development stage.

Tough, the sentence was relatively light compared to the 24 years in prison meted out to former Enron chief executive Jeffrey Skilling in October. 

Enron file for bankruptcy protection in December 2001, than three months after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, jolting already shaken US financial markets and fuelling a government push to clean up corporate accounting practices.

To date, criminal charges have been brought against 36 defendants, including 25 former Enron employees. Eighteen of those defendants have pleaded guilty or been found guilty after trial,