A Southern California lawyer who lost more than $2 million from a class action settlement by investing client trust funds in the stock market has been sentenced to 18 months in prison.
Sandeep Baweja of the Baweja Law Group in Irvine, Calif., pleaded guilty in October to one count of wire fraud and one count of obstruction of justice after confessing that he had clandestinely transferred $2.5 million from an account at Union Bank of California into an online stock brokerage account with TD Ameritrade Inc. He used the brokerage account to make high-risk trades on the stock market. By December 2008, he had lost all but $55,000 of the money.
