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by Mike Caswell

Christopher Wheeler, the New York stock tout recently jailed for failing to file his taxes, has asked that the judge reduce his sentence to one of home confinement or probation. He claims that he did not submit his tax returns because he suffered from an "abject fear of the IRS" and had mental health issues. He also blames his jail term on his former lawyer, citing failures to present all of the information to the judge at sentencing.

Mr. Wheeler, the former operator of the OTCStockExchange touting site, just began serving a 10-month sentence on the tax charges. Prosecutors said that he failed to file his returns for three years in which he had gross income of $11.95-million. (All figures are in U.S. dollars.) During that same period, he made $2.6-million in a pump-and-dump of four stocks, according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Most of that money came from the promotions of two Canadian pink sheets listings, the SEC said.

As Mr. Wheeler sees it, he received 10 months in jail partly because of failings by his lawyer at his Nov. 18, 2014, sentencing hearing. He claims that his lawyer failed to separate the tax charges from the SEC's pump-and-dump case, leaving the sentencing judge to make an "ominous connection" between the two. He says the SEC case was an entirely separate civil matter, in which jail was not a possibility. Moreover, he settled the SEC allegations out of court without admitting any wrongdoing. (He received a $6.7-million penalty.)

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