Michael Shawn Stewart is headed to federal prison for 24 years after a Denver jury found he helped orchestrate a massive foreign-exchange fraud that prosecutors say drained roughly $179 million from Coloradans and investors around the world.
The 63-year-old former trading firm executive was sentenced Thursday in federal court in Denver to 288 months behind bars and ordered to pay about $93.3 million in restitution. A jury had convicted him last year on multiple wire fraud counts tied to offshore trading outfits that lured clients with promises of sophisticated currency trading.
Prosecutors’ Account Of The Fraud
Federal prosecutors say Stewart and co-defendant Bryant Edwin Sewall ran Mediatrix Capital and Blue Isle Markets as the public faces of what they pitched as an algorithmic foreign-exchange trading program. Investors were told the system had never lost money and that their funds were being handled with cutting-edge precision.
According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado, that sales pitch was a fiction. Prosecutors said Stewart and Sewall manipulated account statements to conceal trading losses, promised investors more than $179 million in returns, and left only about $9.8 million in client accounts when the music stopped…