CONTACT: Fred Alverson
Public Affairs Officer
DAYTON - Carter M. Stewart, United States Attorney for the Southern District of Ohio issued the following statement today in response to the ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit that former President, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Directors of MCSi, Michael Peppel, should be resentenced for his role in a stock price manipulation scheme.
“We argued that the court’s sentence which was well under the sentencing guidelines of 97 to 121 months did not reflect the seriousness of the crime, avoid national sentencing disparities or create any measure of deterrence.
The court accepted every one of our arguments that a seven-day sentence was unreasonably low for a crime that caused hundreds of shareholders to lose a total of $18 million.
We will now prepare to go before the court for a re-sentencing in this case."
MCSi was a Dayton-based computer company that filed for bankruptcy in 2003. Peppel conspired with the company’s chief financial officer to falsify company accounting records and financial statements in order to conceal the company’s actual earnings from shareholders while at the same time laundering proceeds from the sale of his own shares of stock. He pleaded guilty in August 2010 to conspiracy to commit securities, mail and wire fraud, money laundering and willful false certification of a financial report by a corporate officer. He was sentenced on Oct. 24, 2011 to seven days’ imprisonment, serve three years of supervised release and pay a $5 million fine.
No date has been set for the re-sentencing.
Source: U.S. Department of Justice, Office of the United States Attorneys
