Team

The normally bullish Raymond James energy team on Monday reduced its 4Q2006 natural gas price forecast by $2, to $5.75/Mcf from $7.75, based on the “significant bearish shift” in gas storage injections. However, it held its 2007 forecast at $10/Mcf.

Duke Energy on Friday named a new executive team for its electric business and outlined what it said was a more centralized organizational structure. Duke filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission earlier this month to spin off its natural gas unit (see Daily GPI, Sept. 8).

Calpine announced two new members of its senior management team. The company has named James Brown as senior vice president for commodity structuring and valuation and Jeffrey Kinneman as senior vice president for structured finance, strategy and restructuring. Kinneman joins the company from Texas Genco, which recently was acquired by NRG Energy. At Texas Genco he was acting chief risk officer and director of credit and risk management. Brown returns to Calpine, having previously served as vice president-structuring.

An accounting professor who has been paid more than $1 million by the defense team of Enron founder Kenneth Lay testified Wednesday that Lay didn’t mislead financial analysts about Enron in the weeks before it declared bankruptcy.

The defense team grabbed the spotlight last week in the trial of Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling by attempting to tear down former CFO Andrew Fastow’s credibility. Lawyers for Skilling and Lay went right to the heart of their defensive strategy, telling the jury that Fastow was a devious accountant and skilled liar who duped his bosses, stole millions and pushed the company toward financial ruin.

Challenged by the defense team on Monday, a former Enron Broadband Services (EBS) executive acknowledged that he, too, lied to employees, investors and investigators with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) before making a deal to cooperate in the trial of Enron founder Kenneth Lay and ex-CEO Jeffrey Skilling.

The two-man defense team representing Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling grilled the company’s ex-investor relations chief for the sixth day in a row Thursday, attempting to lay the groundwork to prove their clients did nothing illegal in the months preceding the company’s bankruptcy.

Along with affirming its previously announced new senior management team with CEO Steve Baum’s retirement next month, San Diego-based Sempra Energy’s board of directors last Wednesday also proposed changes in its corporate governance by terminating its shareholders’ rights plan and proposing to make directors subject to an annual vote.

Some top personal and political advisers to California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger are turning up as part of the public relations/lobbying team for one of the major proponents of a liquefied natural gas (LNG) terminal along the state’s coast, Australian resources giant, BHP Billiton, according to a political analysis report in Monday’s San Francisco Chronicle.