HOUSTON – Former Enron Corp. Chief Financial Officer Andrew Fastow testified Tuesday that he ran partnerships designed to help the company mask as much as hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

Fastow, 44, took the witness stand against former bosses Kenneth Lay and Jeffrey Skilling, whom federal prosecutors have accused of fraud, conspiracy and other charges in the collapse of Enron in 2001.

In the most highly anticipated testimony yet in the trial, he told jurors about a partnership, known as LJM1, set up in 1999 to help Enron “solve a problem” – that it was facing future losses from its investment in a small startup firm.

“We were doing this to inflate our earnings, and I don’t think we wanted to show people what we were doing,” Fastow said.

Fastow described a conversation with then-Chief Operating Officer Skilling in 1999 in which he said LJM1, the first partnership, would only be able to do limited transactions because it had raised only $15 million in investments. Skilling later served as chief executive officer of the energy trading company for six months until resigning in August 2001, when founder Lay resumed the role.

Fastow said he told Skilling they had to raise more money to continue making similar transactions.

“He said, ‘Get me as much of that juice as you can,”‘ Fastow recalled.

The ex-CFO said the partnerships were designed to “swap” assets with Enron in carefully coordinated transactions designed to allow the company to “report the numbers it wanted to report.”

Fastow described Skilling as concerned about how much of the partnership could be disclosed to investors and analysts.

“Because it would attract attention, and if dissected, people would see what the purpose of the partnership was, which was to mask potentially hundreds of millions of dollars of losses,” Fastow testified.

The partnership posed no financial risk for Fastow, who was guaranteed a $500,000 annual fee when it was set up in 1999 and was also promised 2 percent of the invested capital in the partnerships. Fastow said he raised almost $400 million for LJM2.

In another conversation, Fastow described being urged by Skilling to have one of the LJM partnerships buy a minority stake in a Brazilian power plant owned by Enron because Enron’s South American unit was struggling to meet its earnings target.