SEATTLE -- Former investment guru, author and financial seminar leader Wade Cook and his wife have been sentenced in a tax evasion case.

Cook was sentenced Thursday in federal court to seven years and four months in prison for repeatedly defrauding the Internal Revenue Service.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly also ordered Cook to pay $3.75 million in back taxes on roughly $9.5 million of underreported income generated by sales of Cook's financial advice books, tapes and seminars.

In February, Wade Cook was convicted of tax evasion, filing false tax returns and obstructing justice. The jury was deadlocked on all counts against his wife Laura, who kept the books.

In May, Laura Cook pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice, rather than face a new trial. She admitted that she created documents on her home computer in an effort to evade taxes on income she and her husband received between 1998 and 2000.

Zilly sentenced Laura Cook to 1 1/2 years in prison.

The case centered on government claims that the Cooks created a complex web of interrelated trusts and limited partnerships, shifting money among the various entities to avoid paying taxes.

Cook's lawyer Angelo Calfo has promised to appeal the conviction.

The Cooks, who didn't testify during the trial, had contended they merely loaned themselves money from a trust that was supposed to become a gift to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but government lawyers said the couple never intended to repay the money and thus it was taxable income rather than loans.

They were unable to repay the loans mostly because of the stock market collapse in 2001, their lawyers argued.

Cook, a former cab driver, wrote three get-rich books on his "meter-drop" theory of investing - "Wall Street Money Machine," "Wealth 101" and "Business by the Bible" - and conducted hundreds of seminars in the 1990s on asset protection, stock market investing, real estate acquisition and avoidance of income tax.

At one time his net worth was estimated at more than $200 million.

He shut down his operations in February 2003, a month after his publicly traded company, Wade Cook Financial Corp. of Tukwila, sought Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.