HOUSTON – Bent on matching or beating Wall Street expectations, Enron Corporation fudged its earnings figures with the knowledge of executives Jeffrey Skilling and Kenneth Lay, the company’s former chief contact for investors testified yesterday.

Leading off the government’s case in Messrs. Skilling and Lay’s fraud trial, Mark Koenig told jurors the two men were closely involved in company operations and sought to boost Enron’s stock price, which required impressing stock analysts.

Koenig walked jurors through several drafts of a July 2000 press release in which quarterly earnings were raised from 32 cents per share to 34 cents because Enron executives wanted to beat Wall Street estimates by 2 cents.

“We thought it would maintain or increase the stock price,” Koenig testified.

While Koenig did not say Messrs. Skilling or Lay ordered a fraudulent change, he said he discussed the July 2000 change with Mr. Skilling, then the company’s president, who had to approve any changes to the financial figures.

In another case, in January 2000, Enron changed its quarterly earnings from 30 cents per share to 31 cents after analysts unexpectedly raised their estimates to the higher level, Koenig said.

On the morning of January 19, 2000, Koenig said, Mr. Lay told him “he went to bed and we were 30 cents, and when he awoke, he was watching one of the business stations, and he saw that it was 31 cents.”

He said Mr. Lay told him he had received a voice mail explaining the change. “He understood the issue, fairly matter-of-fact,” Koenig testified.

A bedrock of Messrs. Lay and Skilling’s defense, as explained to jurors in opening statements Tuesday, is that the books were never cooked at Enron, and that the company collapsed because of a market panic and relatively minor wrongdoing by a few employees. Mr. Lay has also said publicly that he believed the company was strong and that Enron was in no danger of failure.

Koenig is one of 16 Enron executives who have pleaded guilty to crimes and agreed to cooperate with the government. The defense has also suggested many of the executives were pressured by prosecutors into striking deals when they were not guilty and will tell the government anything it wants to hear.

Jurors also heard part of several Enron conference calls from 2000 and 2001 in which Koenig said Mr. Skilling exaggerated the success of Enron’s broadband division – at the time a key part of Enron’s growth strategy.

In one example, Mr. Skilling told an analyst $50 million of the revenue in Enron’s broadband division came from the sale of a type of fiber – a figure Koenig said was not part of that division’s “core operating revenues.”

Koenig said he later learned the fiber figure was actually $150 million, or nearly all of the broadband group’s revenue that quarter. At the time, Enron was touting broadband as a key part of its growth strategy. Koenig admitted misleading analysts on those calls himself.

“We were all on the same page of attempting to portray EBS (Enron Broadband Services) as still thriving and doing fine,” he testified. “I wasn’t about to jump in and stop that. I was willing to step in and carry that message.”

Koenig, 50, pleaded guilty in August 2004 to aiding and abetting securities fraud, saying he knew Enron masked losses in a highly touted and unprofitable retail energy unit by folding it into the division that included the company’s trading unit.