More Chevron Spies & Lies

This Huffington Post blog is the stuff of spy novels and would be hard to believe if it all hadn't been so well-documented.

In the blog, Karen Hinton offers up a compilation of some of the dirty tricks played by Chevron's private investigative firms that have been hired to discredit the $19 billion judgment against the company for oil contamination.

A short excerpt reads:

The Chevron Corporation has spied and -- perhaps is still spying -- on the Republic of Ecuador, fueling a fierce battle between the oil giant and President Rafael Correa, who is calling on other South American countries to hold Chevron accountable for the world's largest oil-related disaster in the Ecuadorian rainforest. 

Fearing the loss of an historic, long-running environmental lawsuit in the Ecuadorian rainforest in 2009, Chevron secretly videotaped the judge hearing the case - with a spy pen and spy watch - in an effort to derail the trial by entrapping him, government officials and indigenous community leaders in a faked bribery scandal. 

It goes without saying that if Chevron had been caught trying to secretly videotape a U.S. judge, it would be facing criminal charges.

Read the entire blog here.

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Chevron's Silence Screams Guilt

Again Oil Giant Fails to Defend Misconduct in Ecuador Case

Once again, Chevron's silence tells us more about the company's fraudulent misconduct in Ecuador than do its whitewashed

public statements.

After refusing to answer questions about offering what amounts to a $1 billion bribe to the government of Ecuador to help the company kill the $18 billion lawsuit, Chevron's lawyers refused to address allegations of doctoring a "Judicial Inspection Playbook" to hide its fraudulent testing practices at contaminated well sites during the trial. See this press release for details about the playbook, which Chevron used to instruct its testers how to collect soil and water samples.

In a court brief filed with the Southern District Court of New York in a related matter, Chevron refused to address the Ecuadorians' charges that its environmental consulting firm, GSI Environmental, sanitized the playbook document before giving it to two academic experts who later wrote a report lauding the oil giant's sampling protocol. The two experts are Dr. Pedro J. Alvarez currently the chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University, and Dr. Douglas Mackay, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Davis.

GSI removed all directives ordering the testers to collect only "clean" samples from spots identified during "pre-inspections" that took place before the official judicial inspections. They also removed comments about the local residents drinking, cooking and bathing with water from the nearby streams and rivers. See this document that compares the original playbook with the altered one.

Not surprisingly, Chevron regularly found no contamination at sites that looked like this.

If there's an explanation for this whitewash, we're betting the two academic experts would like to know to ensure their integrity doesn't come into question.

But Chevron is suddenly very quiet.

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Chevron’s Corrupt and Cozy Relationships with Oil Industry Regulators

President Obama recently promised Americans to end the "cozy relationship" between government and the oil industry. No oil company has been better at developing these "cozy relationships" with regulators than Chevron, which is being sued in Ecuador for the worst oil-related contamination on earth. The sordid tales below give you a glimpse of just how far Chevron will go to evade laws designed to protect people and the environment.

Chevron Courts US Regulators With Money, Drugs & Sex: The news media has reported widely about the "cozy relationship" between the U.S. Minerals Management Service and the oil industry, and President Obama has promised to end it by separating conflicting regulatory functions. Recently news broke about an upcoming Inspector General's report which will detail how MMS officials allowed oil companies to write their own oversight reports.

We should not, though, forget about Chevron's corruption of the MMS detailed in a 2008 report.

In September 2008, the Inspector General of the U.S. Department of the Interior accused MMS employees of accepting thousands of dollars in gifts, including ski trips, from Chevron and three other oil companies. The report also alleged drug use and sexual affairs between MMS and Chevron officials and charged that

Chevron was the only oil company that did not cooperate with the IG's investigation.

Chevron's Phony Lab Results:
The New York Times reported recently on the "cozy relationship" between oil companies and laboratories that test for contamination. The article focused on the potential conflict of interest between BP and the laboratories being used by the federal government to test for contamination of the water and soil on the Gulf Coast. State and local leaders are concerned that the labs could distort information about given that they also work for all the major oil companies. They should be concerned. In the lawsuit against Chevron for oil contamination in Ecuador, Chevron is testing soil and water samples at a lab where its own contractor worked even though it tried to pass off the lab as "independent".

Several weeks ago, the indigenous and farmer communities suing Chevron revealed new information that Chevron "cooked" evidence in the Ecuador trial to avoid a judgment – and that the oil company was providing financial support to employee Diego Borja to prevent him from going public with the company's fraud. Among Chevron's corrupt and fraudulent acts, according to Borja: the oil giant directed Borja to create dummy companies in Ecuador to make it appear that a laboratory Chevron used to process soil and water samples during the environmental trial was independent, when in fact it was controlled by Chevron.

The plaintiffs have long contended that Chevron has intentionally and fraudulently used bogus lab testing procedures to artificially lower the amount of contamination reported to the Court.

Chevron Corrupts Weak Governments: Details about the waivers and permits that U.S. federal agencies granted BP on the Gulf Coast prior to the oil spill are not comforting – they suggest that the regulators the American people were depending on to protect us from disasters have been thoroughly compromised by their cozy relationship to the oil industry. But this shouldn't be surprising to anyone who pays attention to this sector. Chevron in particular has a long history of colluding with government officials to exploit natural resources at the expense of that country's citizenry.

The most destructive and disturbing incidents occurred over four decades in Ecuador's rainforest, where Texaco (now Chevron) intentionally contaminated the waterways and soils and destroyed a way of life for indigenous groups that has led to suffering, illness and ultimately death for untold numbers of people. The "cozy relationship" that Texaco developed with the governments of Ecuador during this time (from 1964 to 1992) resulted in the largest environmental disaster on the planet.

It also produced a fraudulent remediation agreement between Texaco and the government – an agreement that Texaco and now Chevron argue releases it from any liability. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up a small number of oil sites in exchange for the release and cites the agreement as its main defense in the 17-year-old lawsuit. However, recent testing conducted during the Lago Agrio trial at the oil sites Texaco said it cleaned found them to be just as contaminated as the oil sites not cleaned. For their part in the scam, two Chevron lawyers, involved in the negotiation of the remediation agreement, along with seven former government officials, have been indicted for fraud in Ecuador.

As the oil pours into the marshes and onto the beaches of the Gulf Coast, people need to pay more attention to Chevron's disastrous story in Ecuador.

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Chevron’s “Good Samaritan” is a Drug Trafficker and a liar…

An article in the New York Times today outlines the latest findings about the American, Wayne Hansen, who supposedly owned a remediation company, and who Chevron claimed made secret videotapes to expose "corruption" out of the goodness of his heart. Well, turns out that almost everything the guy said about who he was and who Chevron claimed he was is a lie – he does not own a remediation company, he has never done any remediation, and he is a convicted felon (For trying to smuggle 275,000
pounds of drugs).

And this brings up a serious question: if the guy isn't who Chevron says he is, and if he wasn't actually looking for remediation contracts (since he didn't have a remediation business), what was he doing in meetings, asking leading questions, while he secretly videotapes it? Why was he in that room? More and more signs are point towards Chevron, the only party that benefited from Hansen's attempt to undermine the trial in Ecuador.

Read on, from the Times:

October 30, 2009

Revelation Undermines Chevron Case in Ecuador

By CLIFFORD KRAUSS

HOUSTON — An American whose secret recordings have placed him at the center of a $27 billion lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador is a convicted drug trafficker, records show, throwing another complication into a case already tainted by accusations of bribery and espionage.

The lawsuit pits Ecuadorean peasants against Chevron over oil pollution in the Amazon and has been a major headache for the company for nearly a decade, producing a saga that underscores many of the hazards and ethical challenges of oil companies working in the developing world.

The company appeared to gain the upper hand in August when it revealed video recordings — captured on watches and pens implanted with bugging devices — that suggested a bribery scheme involving Ecuadorean officials, and possibly even the judge hearing the case.

But the company was put on the defensive again on Thursday, after lawyers for the peasants revealed that one of two men who made the tapes was a convicted felon. Court and other records provided by the plaintiffs show that Wayne Hansen, the American who helped make the recordings, was convicted of conspiring to traffic 275,000 pounds of marijuana from Colombia to the United States in 1986. He also was sued successfully in 2005 by a woman who accused him of unleashing his two pit bulls to attack her and her dog.

The disclosure adds more questions about what motivated Mr. Hansen and an Ecuadorean partner to record meetings for Chevron's use, which the company has characterized as an act of whistle-blowing by men offended by unethical behavior and evidence that the handling of the case had been flawed.

"It's another blockbuster development in a case that never runs short of them," said Ralph G. Steinhardt, a professor at George Washington University Law School. "It doesn't necessarily mean there was no bribery plan, but anything that undermines the credibility of the witness undermines the case of the party that would call that witness."

Trevor Melby, Mr. Hansen's lawyer, did not deny his client had a criminal history, saying, "The thing about felony convictions is they follow you to the grave, but even if he had 15 felony convictions it wouldn't change the tapes." Mr. Melby said he was not being paid by Chevron.

The origins of the case go back to the 1970s, when Texaco operated in partnership with the Ecuadorean state oil company to produce oil in the Amazon. Peasants filed suit in 1993, saying that the company, which had ceased to operate in Ecuador by then, had left an environmental mess that had caused illnesses among villagers. Chevron bought Texaco before the case could be resolved.

Chevron has long said that it could not receive a fair hearing in Ecuador before a hostile judge and government. That argument seemed to be reinforced by the recordings obtained by Mr. Hansen and an Ecuadorean man who had worked as a contractor for the company. They showed an Ecuadorean political go-between working to obtain $3 million in bribes for environmental cleanup contracts to be awarded after the case ended.

But it remained unclear why Mr. Hansen was involved in the discussions. The plaintiffs said that an inquiry into his background by a private investigator found that Mr. Hansen did not hold an engineering license, never finished college and showed no record of being qualified to remediate pollution as he portrayed to Ecuadorean officials in the tapes.

Chevron has said it had no involvement in the videotaping, and company spokesmen have said Mr. Hansen was never their point of contact. "We've had no association with this guy," said Donald Campbell, a Chevron spokesman. "This issue is the content on the video and the transcripts that we turned over to the prosecutor general of Ecuador and the U.S. Department of Justice, which shows inappropriate meetings by the judge in our case, extensive government interference in the trial and a bribe plot involving $3 million."

The other man involved in making the recordings, Diego Borja, has since been moved to the United States with his family at Chevron's expense, and he has been receiving an undisclosed amount of living expenses.

No bribes were shown in the tapes, but the plot supposedly included Judge Juan Núñez, who was presiding in the case. Mr. Núñez recused himself, though he says he did nothing wrong.

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Chevron Bribing Becomes SOP?

We've written before about Chevron's willingness to jump into the bribing business, where expedient, paying soldiers, auditors, etc. But now it appears this is just becoming a day-to-day thing for the company. According to the Asia Times, Chevron has refused to disclose how much the company paid officials in Cambodia to secure the rights to drill in the area.

''[Chevron has] yet to respond to our detailed questions in a letter written to the company in October 2008,'' said Gavin Hayman, campaigns director for Global Witness (GW), a London-based anti-corruption watchdog. ''It is not in favor of supplying information about what it pays foreign governments to secure rights for oil exploration.''

Chevron's attitude towards disclosure ''will be telling'', he said in an interview, since revelations could help measure the scale of ''under-the-table payments'' involved in a country where a small and powerful elite has ''captured the country's emerging oil and mineral sectors'' for personal gain.

According to the article, Cambodia lacks a well-functioning anti-corruption regime and is susceptible to "the powerful few filling their personal coffers" from the extractive industry. This is a perfect situation for Chevron and is very reminiscent of Ecuador circa 1964 or so. After all, the company has already been awarded part of the mining contract, with oil to start flowing in 2011 to the tune of $174 million annually, with oil production probably reaching $1.7 billion annually at its peak.

Hey Cambodia, be careful – I know this oil deal-with-the-devil thing seems like a good idea now, but you may want to take a look at how this same dance worked out for Burma, Ecuador and Nigeria. You may figure out that you don't want to be dealing with cancer, human rights violations, and the wholesale destruction of your country 20 years down the line.

Just a thought.

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Corruption: Shouldn’t We All Just Say No?

As I stumbled through the internet doing some follow-up research on the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) (following up on my post from a couple of weeks ago), as I was surprised to find that I'm not the first one to look to Chevron while investigating the FCPA: Charles James, the general counsel and head lawyer for Chevron recently spoke at U.C. Berkeley's law school, Boalt Hall, at a conference on global corruption.

While there wasn't a full transcript on the event, it seems from the summary of remarks that James identified himself as "not a big fan of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act" and heavily criticized the enforcement of the law, seemingly arguing that when the law is enforced, companies like Chevron are at put at a competitive disadvantage.

James' remarks offered a very different perspective than the other panelists. Judith Miller, general counsel of engineering giant Bechtel corporation, argued that the short-term pain of losing business to companies that do pay bribes is well worth the payoff of curbing corruption, since bribes hurt the countries that receive them AND the companies that pay them (since the bribes retard development of the countries, encourage further corruption, and force the companies to incur additional operating costs to secure contracts). However, James doesn't seem to see it this way, only seeing the FCPA as putting Chevron at a competitive disadvantage because they can't legally pay foreign officials for preferential treatment.

You would think a company running a massive p.r. campaign to show their good corporate governance – the "human energy" initiative – would embrace the FCPA. But under Charles James, I guess not.

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