Skilling (right) is escorted in handcuffs into the Federal Courthouse in Houston, on Thursday. (Reuters)

Houston, Feb. 19 (Reuters): Former Enron Corp chief executive Jeff Skilling, who led the company as it veered from fraud-fuelled boom towards bankruptcy, was charged on Thursday with fraud, insider trading and lying about Enron’s finances ahead of its spectacular collapse. A sullen Skilling, 50, turned himself in to the FBI early on Thursday and was taken in handcuffs to the Federal Courthouse in central Houston, where he awaited a hearing.

A 42-count indictment naming Skilling also includes new charges, including insider trading, against Enron’s former chief accounting officer, Rick Causey, who pleaded not guilty to six fraud counts last month.

“From at least 1999 through late 2001, defendants Jeffrey K. Skilling and Richard A. Causey and their co-conspirators engaged in a wide-ranging scheme to deceive the investing public, the SEC, credit-rating agencies and others about the true performance of Enron’s business,” said the indictment, handed up by a federal grand jury on Wednesday and unsealed on Thursday.

Skilling, Causey and their co-conspirators “concealed the real Enron,” it said.

In part because of the sale of “hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Enron stock at artificially inflated prices,” Skilling netted more than $89 million in profits between 1998 and 2001, the indictment said.

Causey netted $5 million in stock profits as part of the same scheme, it said.

One of Skilling’s attorneys, Daniel Petrocelli, speaking to reporters in front of the FBI offices, said his client was “doing extremely well under the circumstances” and would release a statement later in the day.

Skilling is the highest-ranking former Enron executive charged in a scandal that rocked Wall Street and Washington and led to a wider probe of corruption in Corporate America.

Former Enron chairman Ken Lay, for years the public face of the company, has not been indicted, but officials have said he is under investigation.

Enron was the nation’s largest energy trader and a political power with close links to President George W. Bush before it filed for bankruptcy in December 2001 amid reports that off-the-books deals had been used to inflate profits and hide huge debt.