Fastow to serve entire sentence
Houston Lea Fastow, wife of former Enron Corp. finance chief Andrew Fastow, will serve her entire one year prison term for helping her husband hide tens of thousands of dollars in ill-gotten kickbacks from the government, a judge ruled Wednesday.
U.S. District Judge David Hittner denied a request from Lea Fastow’s attorney that she be released from prison before her sentence on a tax crime ends in July.
Hittner imposed the maximum prison term possible last year for a misdemeanor charge of filing a false tax form after months of legal wrangling. Lea Fastow wanted to plead guilty to a felony version of the same count in exchange for a term of five months in prison and five months home confinement.
She withdrew her guilty plea to the felony and pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor for endorsing and depositing ill-gotten kickback checks, some of which were written to the couple’s young sons, without noting the income on tax returns.
Lea Fastow’s attorney, Mike DeGeurin, asked Hittner last week to reduce her sentence to time already served and allow her to go free nearly five months early.
Energy efficiency group gets funding
A nonprofit corporation supported in part by Northwest electric utilities has secured $100 million in funding for the next five years.
The Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance promotes energy-efficient products and services in Washington, Idaho, Oregon and Montana. Formed in 1996, the Alliance is funded by power companies such as Avista Utilities, public benefits administrators and the Bonneville Power Administration, the Alliance said in a news release. From 1996 to 2004, the alliance received $165 million in funding.
Since the Alliance began, its programs and the efforts of its partners have saved the region an estimated 130 megawatts of electricity through 2003. That’s enough power for about 85,000 homes. The cost of the savings was valued at $57 million in 2003 alone, the news release said.
By 2010, the efforts of the alliance and its partners are expected to save enough electricity to offset the need for two new power plants in the region and to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by about 2 million tons.
More problems found at Fannie Mae
Washington Federal regulators investigating the accounting of embattled Fannie Mae have discovered additional serious problems, the mortgage giant disclosed Wednesday, as it received a three-month extension for boosting its capital cushion against risk.
The biggest U.S. buyer of home mortgages has been reducing its portfolio of home loans even faster than expected as it prepared to meet the regulators’ original June deadline for a $5 billion capital boost.
An eight-month investigation by the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, which supervises Fannie Mae, last year found serious accounting problems at the government-sponsored company as well as a pervasive pattern of earnings manipulation and lax internal controls. The Securities and Exchange Commission ordered Fannie Mae in December to restate its earnings back to 2001, a correction estimated at $9 billion. The company’s chief executive and CFO were forced out by the board of directors.
Now OFHEO, whose examination continues, has informed Fannie Mae’s board of additional problems including accounting for securities and loans.