Investment adviser gets 12 years

AKRON, Ohio, July 8 (UPI) -- A Pittsburgh investment adviser was sentenced Tuesday to 12 years in prison and to repayment of $213 million to the Ohio Bureau of Worker's Compensation.

Mark Lay, founder of MDL Capital Management, a now-defunct Pittsburgh company, left a federal courtroom in handcuffs, the Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch reported.

A judge refused his lawyer's request to allow him to remain free pending appeal.

Lay is the final defendant to be sentenced in a scandal involving huge losses of funds at the BWC. Lay's lawyers said that he should not have faced criminal charges for giving bad investment advice but federal prosecutors said that he turned what should have been a loss of a few million dollars into a total of $216 million by borrowing against the bureau's money.

"Although Lay's weapon of choice was the cell phone, BlackBerry or even the computer through which he directed trades … his crime was no less deliberate and the harm no less real," prosecutors said in their presentencing memo.