Physician Sentenced as Income Tax Cheat
A Huntington Beach physician was sentenced to 21 months in federal prison and fined $40,000 Friday for filing false income tax returns.
Dr. Nagesh Shetty, 51, owner and attending physician of Harbor Newport Medical Clinic in Costa Mesa, failed to report more than $400,000 in taxable income from 1987 to 1989, according to Assistant U.S. Atty. Kimberly Dunne, who prosecuted the case.
The sentence by U.S. District Judge Gary L. Taylor in Santa Ana included one year of supervised release once Shetty has served his sentence.
Shetty, who denied any wrongdoing, was arrested in July 1994 on 28 counts of mail fraud, but those charges were dropped.
Earlier this year, he retained celebrity lawyer and law professor Alan M. Dershowitz to argue that he had been denied a speedy trial on the income tax charges.
He lost and was eventually convicted by a federal jury in June on three counts of making false statements on his income tax forms.
The case was the result of a probe by the criminal investigation division of the Internal Revenue Service.
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