OK, it’s starting: the sworn testimony under oath that tells us what we knew all along.

Here it is: Enron’s top executives were directly ordering their cooked books.

In this story on the BBC, Convicted executive Ken Rice, who ran Enron’s EBS Internet business subsidiary, testifies that Jeffrey Skilling himself told him, “this is what the number is going to be.”

A number, of course, that had no relation to the real number. Rice said this division was actually selling future revenues, becuase there were no current ones.

And Skilling was involved at every level. “Mr. Skilling was very engaged in the business, he was very hands-on,” Mr Rice said. “Almost any transaction of any size we would bring to Mr Skilling to get his approval.”

Why am I not surprised?