Chevron Operatives Ordered to Testify About Falsifying Evidence In Ecuador

Chevron Operatives Leave California After Being Called to Testify About Falsifying Evidence in Ecuador Environmental Trial

Diego Borja, Sarah Portilla, & Wayne Hansen Fighting Subpoenas Issued by U.S. Courts

Amazon Defense Coalition
6 January 2011 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karen Hinton at 703-798-3109 or Karen@hintoncommunications.com

San Francisco, CA – Chevron's self-described "clandestine" operations agent Diego Borja, his wife Sarah Portilla, and collaborator Wayne Hansen have left California after two U.S. Federal Courts authorized subpoenas to be served upon them related to charges that they tried to corrupt the environmental trial in Ecuador where Chevron faces a potential $113 billion liability, according to representatives for Ecuadorian rainforest residents suing the company.

Diego Borja, who has emerged as a key figure on Chevron's Ecuador legal team for engaging in "dirty tricks" to undermine the 18-year litigation, has apparently vacated the luxury California home that Chevron had rented for him and Portilla since June 2009. Neighbors have said that Borja and Portilla moved to an undisclosed location in Texas.

Borja became a person of interest in the lawsuit after he was recorded last year bragging about his role in "cook(ing) evidence" for Chevron to hide illegal levels of toxic contamination and presiding over various "dirty tricks" to help the oil giant escape liability, including a video sting operation against a judge. He was moved from Ecuador, where he is under official investigation, to California at Chevron's expense and paid a monthly salary.

Borja's sudden disappearance from California was discovered when lawyers for the indigenous plaintiffs attempted to serve subpoenas on him and Portilla commanding them to testify about their roles in falsifying evidence. Portilla, who is Ecuadorian, also worked for Chevron in the Ecuador trial as part of the evidence-handling team and in setting up dummy corporations, according to legal papers.

The timing of Borja and Portilla's move is particularly suspicious given that Borja's colleague, Wayne Hansen, apparently has disappeared from his residence in Bakersfield, California. Hansen was Borja's partner in a failed "sting" operation in which they secretly recorded misleading interviews with the Ecuadorian judge formerly overseeing the environmental case.

In August 2009, Chevron released the videotapes to the news media and accused the judge of being involved in a bribery plot, even though the judge did not attend the meeting where Borja and Hansen offered a bribe and there was no evidence that the judge engaged in misconduct. The plaintiffs charged the tapes were part of a Nixon-style dirty tricks operation likely orchestrated by Chevron's lawyers in Ecuador and the United States.

Before Borja could be interviewed by Ecuadorian authorities investigating the bribery allegations, Chevron paid for his relocation to California and is now paying the fees of a high-profile San Francisco attorney to represent him. His attorney, Chris Arguedes, has blocked all efforts to interview Borja about his work for Chevron.

"We believe Chevron needs to explain whether it is actively assisting Borja and Hansen to evade the authority of the federal courts in California," said Karen Hinton, spokesperson for the Ecuadorians suing Chevron.

"Borja, Portilla, and Hansen have apparently tried to corrupt and sabotage the Ecuadorian trial by cooking false evidence to favor Chevron," she added. "It is critical that all information related to their unlawful activities in Ecuador, including any assistance provided them by Chevron employees and lawyers, be disclosed immediately before a judgment is rendered in the Ecuador court."

Since 2007, the plaintiffs have accused Chevron of evidence tampering in the trial. Borja confirmed the plaintiffs' charges when in taped conversations he admitted the company had "cooked" evidence.

The tapes were made by Santiago Escobar, a childhood friend of Borja's who lives in Canada. They have been turned over to authorities in Ecuador and the United States.

In legal briefs filed with the Northern District Court of California, the plaintiffs repeated Borja's statements that he collected soil samples at contaminated sites and, with Portilla's assistance, replaced contaminated samples with clean ones. Then the two, as employees of an "independent" lab, submitted them to the court as evidence.

"Borja has admitted to engaging in what he has described as a 'dirty tricks' operation, involving those soil samples, to support Chevron's litigation strategy," reads the plaintiffs' brief.

"In short, Chevron has gone to extraordinary lengths and employed the full force of its vast resources to frustrate the Ecuadorian plaintiffs' efforts to obtain a fair trial," the brief continues.

Escobar had told journalists that Borja indicated to him that he has carried out a series of clandestine operations on behalf of Chevron's trial team in Ecuador over a series of years. In June 2009, Escobar said Borja told him he arranged "the biggest business deal of his life" that would "take down the lawsuit" and that he had received a "ton of money" from Chevron for his work. He also said that if the plaintiffs knew what he knew about Chevron's corruption, they would win the trial in an instant.

##

Read More

Bob Herbert of NYT on Chevron: Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde

Bob Herbert's column today detailing the extent of the disaster caused by Chevron in Ecuador is not the first time his attention has turned to the tragedy in the region. The below article appeared in the New York Times on October 20, 2005.

You can find the original at: http://select.nytimes.com/2005/10/20/opinion/20herbert.html

October 20, 2005

Op-Ed Columnist

Rain Forest Jekyll and Hyde?

By BOB HERBERT

Please welcome the latest entry to the Chutzpah Hall of Fame: the mighty Chevron Corporation.

On Oct. 28, during a gala ceremony at its headquarters in San Ramon, Calif., the company, which until May was known as ChevronTexaco, will honor the latest recipients of the annual Chevron Conservation Awards. The awards are meant to recognize the achievements of men and women who have "helped to protect wildlife, restore wilderness, create natural preserves and parks, and institute educational programs to heighten environmental awareness."

Meanwhile, Chevron's lawyers are in Ecuador defending the company against charges that it contributed to one of the worst environmental disasters on the planet. The company is accused of dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste, over a period of 20 years, into the soil and water of a previously pristine section of the Amazon rain forest.

According to a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of some 30,000 impoverished residents of the rain forest, this massive, long-term pollution has ruined portions of the jungle, contaminated drinking water, sickened livestock, driven off wildlife and threatened the very survival of the indigenous tribes, which have been plagued with serious illnesses, including a variety of cancers.

Chevron, which likes to promote itself as a champion of the environment, contends that no such catastrophe occurred. A spokesman told me yesterday that the billions of gallons of waste that was dumped "wasn't necessarily toxic."

"We've done inspections," the spokesman said. "We've done a deep scientific analysis, and that analysis has shown no harmful impacts from the operations. There just aren't any."

You would have a very difficult time selling that story to the people in the rain forest who have been drinking and bathing in water fouled with the byproducts of oil-drilling processes. Parents have watched their children play and their livestock feed in areas contaminated with oily substances. Pits that perpetually ooze gunk and oil are ubiquitous.

Two years ago, a reporter from The Times interviewed a man named René Arévalo who lived near a separation plant that was once operated by a Texaco subsidiary. The house in which Mr. Arévalo and his five children lived had been built on a mound of dirt that covered a pit where wastewater had been dumped.

The family got its water from a well. "If you dig here just a meter deep," said Mr. Arévalo, "you hit oil. The water is contaminated, very contaminated. But we drink it. What else can we do?"

Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001. From the early 1970's to 1992, the Texaco subsidiary was part of a consortium that ran the oil-drilling operations in an area of virgin rain forest known simply as the Oriente - the East. Texaco discovered oil there in the late 60's.

According to nearly all accounts, neither Texaco nor its primary partner in the consortium, Ecuador's state oil company - Petroecuador - paid much attention to the effects of the venture on the surrounding environment and its people. Tremendous amounts of waste generated from the drilling, extraction, processing and transportation operations - billions upon billions of gallons - were dumped into unlined pits in the ground or poured into freshwater streams.

"The systematic way that they disposed of toxic waste in Ecuador was to dump it into open-air pits that they dug out of the jungle soil, or directly into rivers, streams and swamps in one of the most delicate ecosystems on the planet," said Steven Donziger, who is part of a team of American and Ecuadorean lawyers handling the lawsuit.

Crude oil was also spilled in the jungle, millions of gallons of it.

Disasters of this kind, involving poor people in remote areas of foreign countries, tend to stay low on the level of awareness of the American news media. The suffering tends to go unnoticed by the outside world.

The families in the vicinity of the Ecuadorean oil-drilling operations have had to drink from contaminated rivers and streams because they had such limited access to running water. And any pollution-related illnesses they may contract pose an even greater danger than normal because of their abject poverty and the absence of adequate health care.

Officials at Chevron do not see any of this as their problem. They will tell you that they've cleaned up any mess they might have made, and then some. And they will deny to their dying breath that they have harmed anyone.

After all, they're champions of the environment.

Read More

Chevron Lawyer Admits Chevron Corruption

One of Chevron's chief Ecuadorian lawyers, Rodrigo Perez Pallares, has admitted under oath that the company has been lying to courts in the United States and Ecuador to evade a potential $27 billion liability in Ecuador. Chevron is accused in a lawsuit of deliberately dumping more than 18.5 billion gallons of toxic "produced water" and oil waste into Ecuador's Amazon rainforest when Texaco (now Chevron) operated and reaped the profits of an oil concession there from 1964 to 1992.

For years, Chevron's primary defense in the case – given that the scientific evidence of pollution is overwhelming -- is that the government of Ecuador "released" it from any future liability in return for a partial "remediation" even though that so-called "remediation" has been exposed as a complete fraud.

But the sworn testimony of Perez Pallares, Chevron's own lawyer and the man who negotiated and signed the "release" agreement, proves what the Amazonian communities have long said – that Chevron knows that this legal defense is bogus. When Perez Pallares was asked in a deposition in the United States if the "release" impacts claims of third parties parties who did not sign the release (like those of the Amazonian residents currently suing Chevron) his response was simple: The release has no impact on those claims.

This testimony directly contradicts what Chevron is saying in various courts around the world, to its shareholders, to journalists, and to the SEC and regulatory authorities. Perez Pallares made his statements on November 16, 2006, during a deposition in a separate litigation between Ecuador's government and Chevron in New York federal court. In that case, Chevron hastily withdrew the "release" claim when it appeared a U.S. federal judge could actually review it and issue a ruling.

An excerpt from the stunning testimony of Perez Pallares:

Q: But what [Article 8 of the MOU] does do instead is it carves out entirely any action brought by parties who were not parties to the settlement agreement. Would you agree with that?

The Witness (Pallares): I agree…

Q: If I'm understanding you correctly, and I don't mean to mischaracterize your testimony – you'll tell me if I'm incorrect – I think what you're saying is that a plaintiff can sue in Ecuador but can only obtain relief to the extent that Ecuador permits that relief.

Pallares: That's exactly it.

Q: But the MOU and the settlement doesn't affect that one way or the other. It doesn't give them rights they would not otherwise have. Is that a fair statement?

Pallares: That's correct.

Read the entire page of the testimony here.

Note also that section VIII of the Memorandum of Understanding signed by Chevron and Ecuador's government in 1994 explicitly states (in reference to the release):

The provisions of this agreement shall apply without prejudice to the rights possibly held by third parties for the impact caused as a consequence of the operations of the former PETROECUADOR-TEXACO Consortium.

Remember, Perez Pallares negotiated and signed the "release" for Chevron so we can assume he knows what he's talking about.

Chevron's CEO, John Watson, and General Counsel, Hewitt Pate, know that the company has been lying about its "release" of liability in Ecuador – which is why they've been desperate to attack the people bringing the lawsuit against the company and their allies. This desperation (and Watson's thin skin about the Ecuador issue) was on display in recent days when the company's annual shareholder meeting exploded into chaos when Watson couldn't handle being confronted by critics of Chevron's abysmal human rights and environmental record. Instead of talking to the critics, who had a legal right to be present at the shareholder meeting, Watson lost control of the meeting and ordered Chevron's private security forces and the Houston Police Department to crush the protestors – arresting five non-violent company critics, including a reverend from Oakland, CA. Now Chevron and the Houston Police Department are facing additional liability for blowing their cool and treating the shareholder's meeting like a junior high school student council meeting.

Given the size of Chevron's Ecuador liability and his own involvement in covering it up, Watson's desperation is understandable. Watson and Pate know that the scientific evidence – more than 62,000 chemical sampling results – and trial record – more than 200,000 pages of evidence, testimony, and motions – conclusively demonstrate Chevron's culpability in a disaster that is several orders of magnitude larger than the terrible tragedy caused by BP's spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Given Chevron's despicable conduct in Ecuador, it is not surprising that Watson is using any means necessary to escape the liability – even if it includes lying to U.S. and Ecuadorian courts about the so-called "release" that his own lawyer knows is a bogus defense.

Read More

Great posting over at the DailyKos

Bob Zimway over at the DailyKos has posted a fantastic series of commentaries on Chevron's Amazon disaster. I think he summed up Chevron's plight quite well:

News: Chevron Faked Lab Results in Spill Trial

This news comes on the heels of two diaries I published in the last week, about the Chevron case, and about Yasuni National Park and Ecuador's new constitution.

The caca's really hitting the ventilidor for Big Oil. If this case goes against them, every third world country with a trans-national corporation drilling in its back yard has suddenly been dealt the upper hand.

I love it when a writer can be both snarky and accurate - if Chevron eats a $27 Billion judgment, such as they're facing in Ecuador, it will set a precedent that could lead to people all around the world suddenly having the right to sue companies for years of mistreatment. Suddenly we would be looking at a world where people who feel that they've been oppressed would actually have a way to fight back - they could go to court and try to prove their case, even if the company that destroyed their lands is far away. So, as Bob summed up so well, the caca is really hitting the ventilidor.

Read More