The trial got underway today of former Enron bosses Ken Lay and Jeffrey Skilling. The pair face charges over their alleged role in the firm's multi-billion dollar collapse.
The long-awaited trial comes more than four years after the former energy trading giant collapsed in a December 2001 scandal that set off a wave of corporate scandals and tainted the Bush administration.
Lay and Skilling presided over Enron as it rose to become the seventh largest US company, then plummeted into bankruptcy.
They face more than three dozen fraud and conspiracy charges that accuse them of lying about the company's financial state while they filling their bank accounts by selling millions of dollars in stock.
Both have vigorously denied any wrongdoing and have spent millions of dollars mounting a defence that Lay on Sunday said he believes will be successful.
"We're going to have a long trial and a tough trial, but we're going to be fine," he told reporters after he attended church.
Lay at one time tried unsuccessfully to get help from the Bush administration, counting on the close ties to President George W. Bush he developed as a major campaign contributor.
He and Bush were close enough that Bush gave him one of his oddball nicknames: Kenny Boy.
Enron's demise left thousands jobless and wiped out billions of dollars in workers' retirement accounts.
So far, 16 people have struck plea deals with the US Department of Justice's Enron Task Force for activities at the company, and five others, including four former Merrill Lynch employees, have been found guilty at trial.
Arthur Andersen, the accounting firm that audited Enron's books and saw its business ruined by its battered reputation, had its conviction for destroying documents overturned by the Supreme Court last year, and prosecutors subsequently dropped the case.