Remember
the names Sarah McMillan, John Conner, and Bjorn Borkman.
They
are Chevron scientific consultants who tried to defraud Ecuador’s courts with
trickery and flat-out lies. Their dishonest work likely will be viewed
with great interest in foreign courts that are looking to seize Chevron assets
to pay for the company's liability in Ecuador.
We
practically fell off our chair when we read the details of this group's
subterfuge in a recent court filing (see pp. 33-85 of this legal brief).
Chevron is certainly creative when it comes to cheating.
None
of this should come as a surprise.
We
recently reported that a new study
by a prominent U.S. scientific consultancy (the Louis Berger Group) yet again
confirms that Chevron is responsible for discharging billions of gallons of
toxic “water of formation” into the streams and rivers of the rainforest in
order to artificially inflate its profits. The consultancy also confirmed
the gritty details of how Chevron tried to trick judges during the Ecuador
trial, which concluded in 2011 with a stunning judgment against the company.
We
note that Chevron’s trickery is on top of the company's intimidatin campaign
-- including efforts to threaten
Ecuador’s judges with jail time and to paralyze the court by
drowning it with frivolous motions.
The
deceptions deployed by McMillan (who is Chevron’s chief scientist) and tainted consultant John
Conner have
come to light in a legal brief filed by Ecuador’s government in its arbitration
dispute with Chevron. The American law firm Winston & Strawn (which
represents Ecuador) quietly has been forcing Chevron to disclose documents that
prove the company tried to corrupt the Ecuador trial.
Examples
of Chevron’s tricks as described by Winston & Strawn include:
**
Conner wrote a playbook
directing the company’s field technicians to find only “clean” soil during the
judicial inspections by sampling in areas up-gradient from visibly contaminated
waste pits. Chevron’s technicians then tried to act like they were
engaging in “random” sampling in front of the judge.
**As
confirmed by Bjorkman, Chevron conducted secret pre-inspections of several of
the company’s former well sites where it found numerous dirty soil samples that
far exceeded Ecuadorian regulatory norms. Rather than report these
samples to the court, the company hid the results.
(This
critical data as well as the evidence of Chevron's corruption was not reviewed
by U.S. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan is his tainted and
farcical RICO trial against the Ecuadorians and their counsel.
This evidence will be reviewed by enforcement courts that are being asked
to seize Chevron’s assets to force the company to comply with the Ecuador
judgment.)
**Chevron’s
Ecuadorian lawyers -- led by the notorious Adolfo Callejas -- lied to
the Ecuador court by claiming the company never performed the tests during
its secret pre-inspections. (See p. 65 of the aforementioned legal brief.)
**During
the official judicial inspections (when the judge was present), Chevron tried
to take soil samples from the shallow surface layer of dirt that it used to
cover its oil waste pits during a sham remediation
in the mid-1990s. Yet data showed that several feet below where Chevron
was sampling, the waste pits were saturated with oil that was contaminating
soils and groundwater.
**A
Chevron operative, Diego Borja, confessed on tape that he would often switch
dirty samples for clean ones before submitting them to laboratories for
analysis. He also confessed that the company set up dummy “independent”
labs that actually were controlled by Chevron. For more on Borja
and his corrupt activities, see here.
**McMillan’s
team also mixed dirty soil with clean soil from the same site so as to
artificially lower the average of the contamination found.
**Chevron
never tested for key markers of oil contamination, such as Total Petroleum
Hydrocarbons. Instead, it tested for more narrow constituent elements
that made the contamination appear less extensive than it really was.
**Chevron
used two inappropriate laboratory tests (TCLP and Method 8015) that made it
virtually impossible
to detect illegal levels of contamination, even from oil-saturated soil.
Method 8015 counts only 50% of the hydrocarbons in petroleum, while the
TCLP test often captures less than 1% of the actual contamination.
(The
TCLP test runs water over soils contaminated with hydrocarbons, and measures
the amount of hydrocarbons in the runoff. Because water and oil don’t
mix, the runoff contains almost none of the oil in the soil.)
**Chevron’s
team also refused to test for an extremely toxic class of Polycyclic Aromatic
Hydrocarbons that are harmful to human health -- apparently knowing that such
tests would point to its guilt.
**Chevron
blamed high cancer rates and other health problems on the presence of fecal
matter even though there is no scientific evidence connecting fecal matter with
cancer. The high rates of
cancer and
risks to human
health have
been confirmed
in several peer-reviewed studies by independent doctors.
The
legal brief captured the company’s subterfuge:
Chevron
has expended tremendous sums on expensive experts, laboratories, and
technology. Armed with its deep resources, Chevron systematically and
deliberately devoted time and money to detect where contamination exists and
where it does not. Chevron then systematically did everything in its
power to avoid sampling at the most contaminated locations, thereby seeking to
minimize its findings of contamination, all the while contending that its
anything-but-random samples [during the official judicial inspections] were
“representative” of the whole. They were not.
We
admire the restraint of the writer. It’s not often one can clinically
describe an outright fraud by an American oil company designed to hide one of
the world’s worst ecological catastrophes.
Despite
the trickery, Chevron still submitted enough soil samples to the Ecuador court
from the official inspections to prove the claims against it. This
underscores just how saturated with oil waste Chevron's facilities are years
after it fled the country.
Incredibly,
additional proof of Chevron’s deceit was captured by the oil company itself on
videos it made of its secret pre-inspections.
Chevron’s
video outtakes – which the company has asked courts to seal – show field
technicians laughing at the contamination and mocking the Ecuador court
process. A Chevron whistleblower turned them over to a U.S.-based
environmental organization. It is highly doubtful the company can keep
them under wraps forever.
As
we have reported, the LBG report validates the decisions of three layers of
courts in Ecuador that found the company liable and imposed the damages
award. The amount ($9.5 billion) surely must sting in the Chevron
boardroom. But it is actually a modest penalty taking into account the venality
of the company’s misconduct and the magnitude of the damage. BP’s
liability is three times higher (and rising) for the far smaller Deepwater
Horizon spill.
Chevron
of course admitted to
deliberately dumping at least 16 billion gallons of oil-laced produced
water when it operated in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992. The company also
abandoned more than 900 unlined waste pits gouged out of the jungle
floor. Cancer rates in the region, where an estimated 200,000 people
live, have skyrocketed.
We
note that McMillan, Conner, and Bjorkman are not the only “academics” willing
to sell their integrity to Chevron for money and make themselves complict in
human rights abuses. The company also has submitted to courts reports
from Douglas
Southgate, who is associated with a think tank that denies
conventional theories about global warming; and the infamous Ralph Marquez,
formerly the lead lobbyist for the chemical industry in the state of Texas and
a Chevron consultant.
When
Chevron management decides to do business with dogs like this, everybody associated
with the company gets fleas. No reputable academic would even think of working under McMillan, whose entire purpose is to obfuscate the truth and to cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific evidence of the company's crimes.