June 24, 1999
Portland, Maine

Former Edgecomb resident and long-time tax accountant and commercial loan broker Donald Shields was sentenced Tuesday to 366 days in a federal penitentiary and ordered to pay $157,000 restitution for his role in raising money for Catherine Duffy Petit’s lawsuit against Key Bank.

Shields pleaded guilty to felony counts of mail fraud and money restructuring and agreed to cooperate with the U.S Attorney’s Office in building its case against Petit and four co-defendants. He was not called to testify in the six-week trial.

He was supposed to be sentenced last week, but U.S. District Court Chief Judge D. Brock Hornby postponed sentencing until Shields filed amended tax returns as part of his plea agreement.

It is unclear whether Shields disclosed the fact that he had a bank account for a Montana registered Limited Liability Corporation on his tax returns. Shields has repeatedly claimed that he had no bank accounts or assets in past financial disclosure hearings. Shields is currently leasing and living in an $1100/month Portland apartment.

In Lincoln County, District Attorney Geoffrey Rushlau has agreed to a plea agreement this week with Shields’ attorney that would have him plead guilty to five counts of felony forgery unrelated to the Petit case and allow him to serve his sentence concurrently with his federal sentence.

Rushlau said Thursday that he would recommend that agreement to the judge at Lincoln County Superior Court Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. The DA said his office coordinated some scheduling conflicts with the U.S. Attorney’s Office regarding Shields, but that the sentence recommendation came from his office, not the U.S. Attorneys.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Donald Clark, the lead prosecutor in obtaining a 16-year sentence for Petit and lesser amounts for three other co-defendants, asked for a 10-month sentence for Shields.

Clark told Judge Hornby that Shields came forth willingly to cooperate with the prosecutors after he found out that the Petit scheme to raise money was fraudulent. However, Shields contradicted that account in an interview in the Wiscasset Newspaper last week, saying that he was innocent and forced into cooperating by the prosecutors.

Shields’ plea agreement also offered him immunity from prosecution in a case in which he admitted conducting fraud with Ingrid Kiefer, a German-born businesswoman. He was found guilty in a civil case filed in a Bangor court and ordered to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars under the federal RICO act.

Shields currently has over $1 million in court judgements against him in jurisdictions around the state.