HOUSTON (AP) - Enron's former broadband finance chief received one year's probation, including nine months' home confinement, for falsifying company books.
     
Kevin Howard's sentence Monday came under a deal with prosecutors for his June 1 guilty plea. The Houston Chronicle reports that under the plea deal, he could have received up to 12 months' home confinement.
     
Prosecutors had counseled leniency for U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore's sentence. They stipulated that Howard didn't benefit personally from any fraud committed at Houston-based Enron, which collapsed in December 2001 under the weight of faked accounting.
     
Howard had been tried twice, first in 2005 in a proceeding that ended in a hung jury, then in 2006 that ended in convictions that Gilmore tossed out.
     
(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press.  All Rights Reserved.)     
AP-NY-11-02-09 1324EST

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