David Milstead, the Rocky's finance editor, is weighing in each day with his analysis of the Joe Nacchio trial in his "Out of Order" blog at RockyMountainNews.com. Here's an excerpt from Monday:

This is a rough way of keeping score, but former Qwest executives and directors on the prosecution witness list outnumber the ones on the defense list by about a 2-to-1 ratio.

But what weight shall we give to Qwest founder and former Chairman Phil Anschutz, potential witness for the defense, according to the list submitted by Nacchio's attorneys?

Is Anschutz on the list voluntarily, planning to back up Joe's account?

Does his appearance on the list mean Nacchio chose not to try and turn on Anschutz and provide evidence sufficient for prosecutors to go after him?

(Anschutz has already been investigated by the Securities and Exchange Commission and Department of Justice and not charged.)

Anschutz might not be on the list voluntarily, though. After all, Craig Slater, a longtime Anschutz lieutenant, is on the prosecution witness list.

Perhaps Nacchio will testify Anschutz knew everything Nacchio did and he was following the wishes of the controlling shareholder of the company.

Nacchio testified to Congress in the fall of 2002 that he discussed every major business decision with Anschutz and that the two talked two or three times a week. But Ken Johnson, spokesman for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, where Nacchio testified, said "neither Nacchio nor anyone at Qwest has provided us with any documentation to suggest that Anschutz's role was anything more than he has said it was - largely ceremonial."

(Anschutz owned 100 percent of the company when it was private, but his stake declined to roughly 18 percent by 2001. He and two other Anschutz Corp. employees served on the 14-member board.)

Either way, Anschutz's appearance provides a defense unavailable to other executive defendants.

In other corporate scandals, CEOs such as Ken Lay (Enron) and Bernie Ebbers (WorldCom) were seen as kings of the realm, with no strong board chairman supervising them.

Former Qwest executives have told the Rocky that Anschutz was a hands-on chairman at Qwest, conversing with co-Chairman Nacchio frequently.

He has dodged Nacchio's troubles since he was not the public face of the company and did not make the statements to Wall Street. Nacchio did.

Anschutz's stock sales exceeded Nacchio's in sheer dollar volume - he sold $1.57 billion worth to BellSouth in 1999 at that company's request as a condition of a deal. But they weren't as poorly timed as Nacchio's, and they didn't occur on the open market.

The Denver financier left his chairman's position after Dick Notebaert joined Qwest as CEO in 2002 and recently completed selling his stake in Qwest.

While his representatives have portrayed his chairmanship as "ceremonial," defense attorneys seem to believe he knows something important about what was really going on at Qwest.