Contractor can retract guilty pleas in fraud case, court rules

A cottage-country contractor who pleaded guilty earlier this year to multiple fraud-related charges has been allowed to retract most of those pleas.

Scott Eisemann, 55, is accused of taking hundreds of thousands of dollars from more than a dozen Ontario cottage owners for renovation projects that were left unfinished. CBC Toronto was the first to report in 2020 about complaints against Eisemann and his company, Cottage Life Construction, from cottage owners in Parry Sound, Georgian Bay, Orillia and elsewhere in the Muskoka region.

He faced 13 charges in total, with each count relating to a separate individual he allegedly defrauded.

In January, Eisemann pleaded guilty to seven of those charges at the Ontario Court of Justice in Orillia as part of a deal with the Crown that would have seen him serve time in jail.

During that hearing, a detailed statement of facts was read out in court laying out the particulars of how Eisemann allegedly took money from one of the victims but didn't complete the promised work. Court heard that similar statements for the other six victims were expected to be read out at a sentencing hearing a month later.

However, after that hearing, Eisemann petitioned the court to retract his guilty pleas, arguing that on the day of the plea he was suffering from "lack of sleep and significant depression and anxiety" and only skimmed the facts he was agreeing to, Justice Anastasia Nichols said in court Monday.

Nichols said Eisemann also claimed he felt pressured by the lawyer who represented him at that hearing to plead guilty and strike a deal for a lighter sentence.

In her judgment read aloud in court Monday, Nichols largely rejected these arguments and declined to strike the guilty plea related to the count for which the facts were read out in court.

"Overall, I found Mr. Eisemann was evasive and argumentative during the course of cross-examination," Nichols said. "I do not accept his evidence that he was in such a state of anxiety and depression that he did not understand the significance of his pleas of guilt that day."

In making that decision, Nichols referenced an email Eisemann sent his lawyer days before the January hearing in which he indicated he had "gone over everything from front to back," came to the conclusion that he wouldn't win the case and had decided to plead guilty.

She also brought up the fact that Eisemann spent time in prison after he was previously convicted for fraud in 2014.

"Mr. Eisemann was well aware of the charge he was facing and pled guilty to," she concluded.

Still, Nichols agreed to strike Eisemann's guilty pleas relating to the six counts where the prosecution and defence had yet to agree on an account of what happened.