A Guatemala company has yet to show it owns equipment at Mason Station, a lawyer for Wiscasset maintains.

In a November 1 letter to a consultant for that company, E.S.I., Wiscasset's attorney James Belleau states the town has never been given adequate documentation of the equipment buys.

“On one occasion you provided me with the name of a lawyer in Florida, concerning those purchases,” Belleau writes to Alex Barboni, a U.S. consultant for the company.

“I contacted that lawyer and he never returned my call,” Belleau's letter continues.

“(T)he Town is taking any and all steps available to it ... to collect amounts owed by Mason Station to the Town,” Belleau writes.

The letter responds to a letter Barboni filed in Lincoln County Superior Court. In it, Barboni, states that five years ago, E.S.I. bought most of the Wiscasset plant's electrical steam generation equipment.

Since then, the company and local contractors have been shipping the equipment to Guatemala; but the company still has equipment there, equipment that the Lincoln County Sheriff's Office has seized, Barboni's letter states.

Town Manager Laurie Smith told selectmen October 15 that the sheriff's office had put signs on equipment at Mason Station, warning that the items have been seized in connection with the town's successful lawsuit for unpaid taxes.

The sheriff's office put up the signs for the town, because the equipment appeared to be wrapped and ready for shipment, Smith said at the time.

Wiscasset got most of the lots at Mason Station through foreclosures for more than $800,000 in unpaid taxes.

Blacked out parts of documents that E.S.I. has provided make those documents unclear, town officials have said.

“We need to be careful. We don't want the ownership to be unclear,” Selectmen's Chairman Ed Polewarczyk said November 8. “We're doing the right things.”

In a telephone interview November 8, Barboni, of Edgecomb, said the documents' blacked out portions contained names of notaries and E.S.I. employees.

“They wouldn't appreciate their names being batted around, so I scratched those out,” he said.

E.S.I. bought the equipment off another company that had bought it from Mason Station, Barboni said. The documents suffice to show that Mason Station does not own the equipment, he said.