Mark D. Lay, founder of MDL Capital Management of Pittsburg, whose fund-management company was given preferential treatment during the Taft Administration by Republican appointees who ran the Ohio Bureau of Workers’ Compensation (BWC), was found guilty Tuesday on four federal fraud charges, according to published reports
The verdict from the charges – investment advisory fraud, conspiracy to commit mail and wire fraud and two counts of mail fraud – shocked Lay and his legal team, including Richard Kerger, who said the case would be appealed. If the case judge decides to not allow Lay to remain free on bond, and should Lay eventually exhaust his options of appeal, he faces a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison and a $500,000 fine.
THE GIFT THAT KEEPS ON GIVING
The verdict today in Akron, where the trial took place over the loss by his company of $216 million in injured workers’ funds, represents the latest in a lengthening line of guilty verdicts that have cascaded from the OBWC corruption scandal now known as Coingate.
Even though Tom Noe is serving 27 months behind federal prison bars for laundering campaign contributions to the 2004 Bush-Cheney re-election campaign and for theft and corruption of BWC funds, his ghost and the gremlins unleashed by Coingate are still haunting Ohio and the Republican Party.
Lay, who was not part of Coingate itself, was nonetheless a beneficiary of the wink-and-nod style of management at the behemoth agency that gave vast sums of money to friends and political campaign contributors of former Republican Governor Bob Taft, the Ohio GOP and their candidates for local, state and federal office.
With the guilty verdicts against Lay, the ghost of corruption that is Tom Noe may have claimed it’s 18th victim in the scandal that many credit with causing such a sour taste in voters mouths last year that they opted to give control to four of the state’s five statewide offices to Democrats, like Ted Strickland, who is the first governor of his party to hold the executive reins in 16 years.
As reported by the Associated Press, the jury in the trial didn’t deliberate all that long before it turned with its verdict. Boiling down the arguments of plaintiff and defense attorneys, the AP reported that prosecutors said Lay wasn’t as forthcoming as he or his company should have been in disclosing the extend to which his investments went beyond the terms of his contract with BWC, while defense attorneys argued that the BWC’s financial loss wasn’t a crime and that Lay’s hedge fund, even though it didn’t prescribe a specific limit did include guidelines sufficient to outline the level of risk that should be taken.