GREENVILLE, S.C. - Former Carolina Investors President Larry Owen pleaded guilty Saturday to securities fraud and was immediately taken to jail in shackles.

Owen admitted to 22 counts of misleading investors, stopping his trial four days after it began. He was the first person to face criminal charges in what is one of the biggest bankruptcies in South Carolina history.

More than 8,000 investors lost about $278 million when Carolina Investors went under last year.

Johnson deferred sentencing for Owen, meaning the 60-year-old executive will likely be used as a prosecution witness against other Carolina Investors and HomeGold officers in later trials, Greenville television station WYFF reported.

Former Carolina Investors chairman and former comptroller general and lieutenant governor Earle Morris Jr. is set to go on trial next in October.

Owen faces a maximum sentence of 196 years and nearly $1 million in fines. But the charges have no minimum sentences.

Attorney General Henry McMaster said his lawyers made no offer of leniency to Owen.

"This was a straight up plea, a complete surrender, a complete confession to the entire indictment," McMaster said. "It is our intention at sentencing time to ask for significant and substantial jail time."

Deputies took Owen from the courtroom to the Greenville County jail, where he entered with shackles on his ankles and handcuffs on his wrists. Owen asked to spend this weekend with his family, but the judge refused.

Owen didn't say much Saturday, but when the judge asked if he was guilty, he replied, "Yes sir. Substantially."

Owen's lawyers had argued that officials at HomeGold, Carolina Investors' parent company, kept him in the dark about how bad things were. He and his wife Anne, a Carolina Investors vice president who also has been indicted for securities fraud, lost $73,000 in the collapse.

But the first four days of testimony in Owen's trial showed otherwise.

The last witness before Owen pleaded guilty was an auditor from Elliott Davis who said Owen was in a March 2002 meeting where he was told a statement would have to be put in the Carolina Investors annual report saying the company was in dire financial shape and might not be able to continue to operate.

Other witnesses included a pastor who said Owen threatened to sue him after he told his parishioners Carolina Investors might be in trouble and a 72-year-old restaurant owner from Union who watched his life-savings of $1.4 million disappear despite promises from Owen he would "never lose a dime."

Instead, Gene Gregory and the other investors, many of whom are near retirement age and suddenly without nest eggs, will get about 15 cents back on every dollar they invested if a tentative settlement of a civil suit is approved by a federal judge.

Many of those investors who packed the courtroom Saturday felt sorry for Owen once he admitted he was guilty. But they still want to see him serve time behind bars.

"He took away the livelihood of a lot of people," Mabel Brown said.

Carolina Investors started in the 1960s financing loans for cemetery plots. It expanded into a corporation that wrote mortgage loans for people with bad credit in South Carolina by the 1990s. Investors helped provide the money for the loans.

In 1995, HomeGold took over and expanded the business nationwide. But the market for high-risk mortgages crashed in 1998 and HomeGold found itself going deep into debt.

By 2002, HomeGold owed more to Carolina Investors' depositors than the company, assistant attorney general Sherri Lydon said in her opening statement Tuesday.