By Doug Fletcher,Staff Writer

Complaints of oil and gasoline price gouging are beginning to flow into state offices.

At least one has caught the attention of the man charged with prosecuting any such wrongdoing.

“I can neither confirm nor deny that any investigation is under way,” Assistant Attorney General Francis Ackerman said Tuesday afternoon, however, “there is one complaint that has piqued my interest.”

The run-up in fuel costs resulting from record trading prices at the New York Mercantile Exchange has prompted the complaints. Ackerman said some funnel into the attorney general’s Consumer Protection Division, others to the governor’s office, which has a division that focuses on energy issues.

“I would be very interested if anyone had any information about collusion or price agreements,” Ackerman said.

That information would have to go beyond simple parallel pricing or “prices that are in lock step,” he noted.

But if someone had heard a service station employee refer to an agreement with “so and so” about prices, or if someone happened to see several oil dealers “leave a McDonald’s together, I would be very interested.”

Ackerman said that dealing with price gouging is “a complicated concept in Maine law.”

The state’s strongest tool for prosecuting such cases is the Unfair Trade Practices Act, he said. The trouble with it, though, is that it targets “prices that are unconscionable” and that rise as a result of special circumstances – market disruptions such as the one during the past decade’s massive ice storm.

There’s another “venerable statute,” Ackerman said, that dates back to World War I rationing and which prohibits “unreasonable profits” on necessities, including gasoline and fuel oils.

In both instances, terminology – “unconscionable” and “unreasonable” – can get in the way of prosecution, since the words have to be defined in present-day use, Ackerman explained.

Penalties regarding the older statute, he added, are slight. “You end up with a slap on the hand as a sanction,” he said, making the better option the Unfair Trade Practices Act.