Garth Drabinsky, a theater impresario who brought Ragtime, Kiss of the Spider Woman, and a revival of Showboat to the Broadway stage, has been sentenced to seven years for accounting fraud.
His business partner at the now-defunct Livent Productions, Myron Gottlieb, was sentenced to six years. The company had a string of Broadway hits in the 1990s and won over a dozen Tony awards before going bankrupt.
They were convicted in March of two counts of fraud and one count of forgery. Canadian prosecutors accused the pair of defrauding investors and falsifying Livents financial records to obtain approximately $470 million in investments and loans.
Toronto prosecutors had asked the court to sentence the men to eight to 10 years in prison. Their lawyers had requested house arrest and community service lecturing students on business ethics.
