Chevron Can't Stop The Lies

In a recent letter to the Canadian newspaper, The National Post, Chevron repeats its lies to distract attention from its own misconduct in the world's largest oil-related environmental disaster in the Ecuadorian rainforest. 


For example, Chevron representatives are fond of claiming that a number of U.S. courts have “found” that there was “fraud” in the litigation in Ecuador. This is completely false. When Chevron made this assertion to one journalist who included it in his story, his publication, Courthouse News, was forced to run a retraction once it realized the reporter had been misled, stating that while “[a]n earlier version of this article quoted a Chevron spokesman as saying that eight federal courts had found the Ecuadorean plaintiffs had committed fraud. In fact, the courts issued crime-fraud exception findings during discovery. Chevron’s fraud allegations against the Ecuadorean plaintiffs remain unproven.” See here.

No U.S. court has made any final determination with respect to Chevron’s fraud allegations. In fact, 13 U.S. courts rejected or otherwise declined Chevron’s invitation to apply what is known as the crime/fraud exception. Such an exception requires a court to make only a prima facie showing that a fraud might have occurred if proven to be true. But no actual factual findings have been made. As one court succinctly put it: “The circumstances supporting [Chevron’s] claim of fraud largely are allegations and allegations are not factual findings."  Another wrote that Chevron was making a "mountain out of a molehill."  See here.

Chevron tries to distract attention from these facts with statements replete with falsehoods; meanwhile, independent journalists have long confirmed the company’s hand in creating this unprecedented catastrophe.  See these recent news reports from the Australia program Sunday Night; the American show 60 Minutes and this extraordinary video from the plaintiffs summarizing the evidence and Chevron’s corrupt attempts to derail the trial.   A story in Vanity Fair on the courageous Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo, who was raised in abject poverty and who has been targeted with death threats, can be seen here.

Chevron takes emails and other correspondence out of context and cleverly edits video to make it appear that our own experts do not believe there is contamination. Yet one of the most respected experts in the world on how contaminants travel in groundwater – Dr. Ann Maest -- testified under oath recently that there is massive contamination of water in Chevron’s concession area. See here and here. In a blatant act of deceit, in a blog Chevron leaves the false impression that Dr. Maest agrees with the company that there is no water contamination.  See here.

Chevron’s assertion that the plaintiffs wrote the judgment is a both a fabrication and a final act of desperation. For this argument, Chevron relies on more paid experts who analyze what they call “word strings” from an internal memo from the plaintiffs that appeared in a handful of paragraphs in the 188-page judgment.  Yet arguments from the memo using the same language were submitted to court in numerous motions throughout the eight-year trial.  It is completely plausible for a court to adopt arguments and language from briefs or other materials submitted to the court.

The real and only fraud is Chevron's environmental crimes, its phony remediation, its manipulation of evidence during the Ecuador trial and its abuse of the rule of law by delaying and attempting to derail the trial during the eight-year-long proceeding. See here, here and  here.

These facts, as confirmed by Ecuador’s courts and independent journalists, are bad for Chevron.  More to the point, they explain why the company tried to sabotage the proceedings in Ecuador, and how it will now try to convince courts it Canada that somehow it was the victim of a shakedown by indigenous groups in Ecuador.

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Expert: Chevron Responsible for 10,000 People at Risk of Cancer

A new expert analysis has estimated that some 10,000 residents of the Ecuadorian Amazon face a sharply increased risk of contracting cancer in the coming decades due to heightened exposure to oil waste due to Chevron's substandard oil-extraction operation in that region from 1964-1990. This expert analysis, filed in the Ecuadorian court hearing a landmark legal case alleging that Chevron should pay to remediate the damage caused by more than 25 years of oil drilling, demonstrates that Chevron's refusal to clean-up its mess has created a critical human health catastrophe. For more information take a look a the press release below from the Amazon Defense Coalition:

Chevron's Ecuador Cancer Problem: 10,000 People at Risk of Contracting Disease in Coming Decades, Says Expert

Oil Giant Faces Up to $69 Billion in Liability for Potential Cancer Deaths

QUITO, Ecuador--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Almost 10,000 people in Ecuador face a significant risk of contracting cancer in the coming decades due to Chevron's refusal to clean up the billions of gallons of oil waste it dumped into the rain forest, a leading American expert has reported to the Ecuador court where Chevron is a defendant in a multi-billion dollar environmental trial.

The cancer assessment was presented on September 16 to the Superior Court of Nueva Loja in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, where Chevron is charged with dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic "water of formation" directly into the rainforest. The company also faces a potential $69 billion liability for the cancer deaths, an amount that accounts for slightly less than half of the top end of the plaintiff's assessment of total damages, estimated at $113 billion.

Dr. Daniel Rourke, a prominent American statistician formerly associated with the RAND Corporation, has concluded that 9,950 people living in the rainforest region in Ecuador where Chevron operated face a significant risk of contracting cancer in the coming decades. The number could spike higher as Dr. Rourke's analysis assumes a clean-up of the contaminated area will begin immediately and be completed in ten years – something that Chevron has thus far rejected out of hand.

"This study demonstrates that Chevron has created a critical human health catastrophe in Ecuador that puts thousands of people at risk of death," said Luis Yanza, who coordinates the legal case against Chevron for approximately 80 rainforest indigenous and farmer communities impacted by the oil giant's operations.

"As it is, hardly a day goes by where we don't receive a report of another cancer death in the area where Chevron operated," he said.

Chevron, which operated several oil fields in the Amazon from 1964 to 1990, is being sued by 30,000 rain forest residents for clean-up costs. The trial is taking place in Ecuador at Chevron's request after it was moved from U.S. federal court in 2002.

Several experts believe the damage caused by Chevron in Ecuador dwarfs the harm generated by the BP Gulf spill, and is probably the world's largest oil-related disaster. The contamination covers an area the size of Rhode Island and will take at least a decade to remediate once funds are in place, according to experts.

The human health problem in the area where Chevron operated is exacerbated by the fact the local population lives in close proximity to the hundreds of oil wells and waste pits that Chevron left behind when it departed Ecuador in 1992. Chevron never warned local residents of the dangers of exposure to the contamination and never fenced off any of its 916 toxic waste pits, which are considered hazardous.

Dr. Rourke's report uses actuarial life-table methodology to estimate the number of lives at risk of cancer as a result of exposure to the oil contamination.

The report utilizes Ecuadorian census data to estimate the population of the region, adjusted for growth rate since the oil operations began in 1964. The value of each excess cancer death was estimated at $7 million, a figure based on an average from the U.S. tort system and an economic concept of the "value of a statistical life" as employed by the US Environmental Protection Agency.

Several peer-reviewed health evaluations had previously found that cancer rates in the region where Chevron operated were dramatically higher than in the rest of Ecuador. These reports can be found here <http://chevrontoxico.com/tags.html?tags=health+studies>.

When Chevron published a full-page ad in Ecuadorian newspapers attacking the health studies, more than 50 eminent scientists signed a letter <http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2005/0406-letter-arguing-that-chevron-misleads-about-health-impacts.html> published in the prestigious International Journal of Occupational and Environmental Health defending the methods used to conduct the health evaluations and criticizing Chevron's efforts to undermine the studies' findings.

Chevron's own damages report, also submitted to the court on Sept. 16, found that the company had no liability and that the oil contamination from its former oil fields poses no harm to human health.

Chevron has been hit hard in the Ecuador trial in recent days.

The company's primary American technical expert in Ecuador, John Conner, suffered a major blow to his credibility when it was reported that he testified in Mississippi that the oil giant had never harmed even a single person in his two decades working as a consultant for the company. Conner also admitted that Chevron had paid his company $8 million in consulting fees, with up to $5 million coming from his work on the Ecuador matter.

After hearing Conner's testimony in Mississippi, a jury delivered a $19 million judgment against Chevron on behalf of five plaintiffs who suffered cognitive injuries from exposure to the company's leaking underground gas tanks.

True to form, in the dozens of expert reports Chevron submitted to the Ecuador court under Conner's supervision, not one has concluded that Chevron's operational practices in the South American nation had harmed even a single person.

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Almost 10,000 Ecuadorians Face Risk of Dying From Contamination

Chevron argues the that lawyers for the Ecuadorian communities have submitted inflated damage claims as the oil giant seeks to derail the lawsuit against it for extensive oil contamination in the rainforest. That argument has now been turned on its head. Last week, several leading American technical experts submitted damage estimates on behalf of the Amazonian communities that found costs higher than those found in the earlier Cabera report, which calculated damages at $27 billion. One reason the damages assessment rose is because the American experts -- using official mortality and census data -- found that 10,000 Ecuadorians risk death from cancer in the coming decades as a result of Chevron’s contamination, even if the contamination is cleaned up over the next ten years. The truth is the Ecuador rainforest will never be the same due to Chevron’s contamination, and no amount of money will ever restore it to its original condition. But whatever can be done to address the contamination should be done – and Chevron, as the operator responsible for the contamination, should take the lead in fixing it just like BP is doing in the Gulf of Mexico. Below is the press release about the new economic valuation analyses of damages in Ecuador’s rainforest -- valuations prepared by American experts that put the lie to Chevron's claims about "fraud" in the Cabrera report.

Uterine cancer victim Rosana Sisalima with her granddaughter

at their home in San Carlos on November 24, 2004.

Rosana succumbed to cancer in 2006.

Chevron Faces Tens of Billions in Clean-up Costs
Top American Technical Experts Weigh In On High-Profile Damages Case

Lago Agrio, Ecuador (September 17) – A group of highly respected American technical and medical experts, using conservative assumptions, have concluded that it could cost Chevron up to tens of billions of dollars to clean up oil waste discharged into Ecuador’s rainforest and compensate local communities for the damage it caused over the 26 years it operated a large oil concession, according to valuation assessments submitted Thursday to the Ecuador trial court.

Relying on official Ecuador census and mortality data, as well as relevant studies, the analysis finds that what is believed to be the world’s largest oil-related catastrophe likely will cause nearly 10,000 Ecuadorians to be at significant risk of dying from cancer by the year 2080 even if Chevron cleans up in the next ten years. The numbers could rise substantially if no remediation takes place.

The assessments analyzed numerous categories of damages, including soil and groundwater contamination, drinking water, excess cancer deaths, natural resources damage, and health costs. While the high end of the damages range of $113 billion is substantially greater than the $27.3 billion damages number set forth in a report in 2008 by court-appointed expert Richard Cabrera, some categories of damages were found to be lower than those estimated in that report.

For example, the combined cost of clean-up for soil and groundwater contamination in the new analysis – which relied mostly on Chevron’s own internal environmental audits -- at the high end of the range was roughly $1.8 billion, compared to more than the $5 billion estimate in the earlier Cabrera report. The analysis found the existence of other categories of contamination, such as oil sediment in rivers, but they could not be accurately quantified.

The differences in the soil and groundwater remediation numbers is largely a function of the fact the new analyses used far more conservative assumptions than the Cabrera report. For example, the Cabrera report concluded soil should be cleaned to a depth of five meters, while the recent analysis assumed only four meters.

A large portion of the damages in the new analyses can be attributed to Chevron’s “unjust enrichment” – money saved by using sub-standard drilling practices – and compensation for potential excess cancer deaths that have a significant chance of occurring in coming decades due to exposure to cancer-causing crude oil. Most of the damages in the Cabrera report were from the same two categories.

“The new valuation analyses are different, in many ways, than the damage assessment report from 2008 but both present reasonable and sound assessments based on the evidence,” said Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the Amazonian communities suing the oil giant.

“The Ecuador court has more than enough evidence and expert analyses to determine the cost of remediating the extensive oil pollution that has devastated thousands in the region for decades,” Fajardo added. “There are more than 100 different expert reports in evidence, dozens of them produced by Chevron, which overwhelmingly demonstrate extensive contamination at all of Chevron’s former oil production facilities.”

The new damages analyses came in a supplemental report submitted by lawyers for the dozens of Amazon communities suing Chevron for what is believed to be the world’s worst oil-related disaster – larger than the size of the BP Gulf spill. Unlike the BP Gulf spill, the Ecuador disaster has been contaminating the rainforest ecosystem for almost 50 years.

Ecuadorian law provides that the court can consider the supplemental information when reaching a decision, but under Ecuadorian law the judge is under no obligation to adopt the estimates. Chevron, which has attacked the credibility of Cabrera’s damages assessment, had the opportunity to submit its own valuations analysis but the company previously indicated it would boycott the process.

Lawyers for the affected communities have asserted Chevron has been trying to sabotage the Ecuador trial by bombarding the court with frivolous motions and boycotting any part of the case that addresses damages. The indigenous and farmer communities first filed the lawsuit in 1993 in U.S. federal court, but it was shifted to Ecuador at Chevron’s request.

“The information in this submission is highly significant because it reflects clearly that there is a terrible oil-related disaster in Ecuador in the area where Chevron operated,” said Fajardo.

“What these analyses make chillingly clear is that thousands of Ecuadorian citizens may well contract and die of cancer in the coming decades because of Chevron’s contamination,” he added.

The analyses, based largely on technical information found in the 200,000-page trial record and relevant studies, found the following damages:

· Soil Remediation: A conservative estimate of potential costs to remediate contaminated soils at all of Chevron’s 378 former oil production facilities in Ecuador ranges from $487 million to $949 million depending on the clean-up standard used. The actual cost could be significantly higher.

· Groundwater Remediation: Based on data in the trial record, the range for clean-up of groundwater is $396 million to $911 million.

· Rivers and wetlands: Data indicates that sediment contamination exists, but no clean-up number was presented pending further investigation.

· Health Care: Using recent data from the World Health Organization and the Ecuadorian Ministry of Health, an estimated $1.4 billion will be needed to provide health care to the thousands of affected persons over the next three decades.

· Drinking Water: Degradation of the environment with petroleum hydrocarbons associated with Chevron’s production activities has been documented at numerous locations. The cost of a comprehensive series of regional water systems is estimated to be between approximately $326 million to $541 million.

· Excess Cancer Deaths: Actuarial life-table methodology demonstrates that the aggregate cost of excess cancer deaths due to exposure to oil contamination in the area where Chevron operated could be approximately $69.7 billion. This is the based on the value of a statistical life used by averaging relevant data used in the U.S. court system and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency ($7 million for each lost life), and comparing it with official Ecuador mortality data and census information. Up to 9,950 people in the affected area will face a significant risk of dying from cancer in the coming decades even if the area is remediated in the next ten years. Even if the analysis stops in 1990 – the year when Chevron ceased being the operator of the oil fields – the aggregate cost of excess cancer deaths is still estimated at $12.1 billion based on 1,732 deaths from cancer. (The earlier Cabrera report estimated 1,401 deaths from cancer, but he did not project future deaths.)

· Natural Resources Losses: This estimate is based on the evidence that concentrations of petroleum hydrocarbons and harmful metals in soil, groundwater, and surface water have exceeded levels considered to be toxic to terrestrial and aquatic biota. While determining the exact values of service losses in the rainforest with precision is not possible, it is not clear that further studies would produce a range of plausible values different from the range posited earlier by Mr. Cabrera – approximately $874 million to $1.7 billion, depending on the methodology employed.

· Unjust Enrichment: Chevron’s unjust enrichment ranges from $4.57 billion to $9.46 billion assuming a 100% probability of detection and ultimate payment, and from $18.26 billion to $37.86 billion assuming a 25% probability of detection and ultimate payment. Given the evidence of Chevron’s malfeasance in Ecuador, the plaintiffs assume the company had at best a 25% probability of detection and ultimate payment, and therefore the unjust enrichment award should at minimum range from $18.26 billion to $37.86 billion. This is a conservative figure, as in reality it is highly unlikely that Chevron believed it had more than a 10% probability of detection and ultimate payment.

· Cultural Impacts on Indigenous Groups: Representatives of the Amazonian communities, noting the acute interdependence between indigenous groups and the rainforest ecosystem, analyzed the impact of hydrocarbon contamination on indigenous culture. The team reviewed economic valuations to repair the loss of cultural and ancestral practices, including a program to purchase unspoiled land, and to construct pools of native fishes and centers to restore flora and fauna. The cost for this restoration is estimated at $481.5 million.

The analyses were submitted by the following scientists and technical experts:
· Douglas Allen, who has 25 years of experience as an environmental consultant working in soil and groundwater remediation;
· Dr. Lawrence Barnthouse, one of the nation’s leaders in ecological risk assessment and a Fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science;
· Carlos Emilio Picone, a medical doctor certified in critical care medicine and Chief of the Pulmonary Section at Sibley Memorial Hospital in Washington, D.C.;
· Jonathan S. Shefftz, a financial economist from Harvard who has performed economic modeling on theories of unjust enrichment for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy;
· Dr. Daniel L. Rourke, who has extensive experience applying advanced statistical techniques to solve complex litigation problems; and
· Dr. Robert Paolo Scardina, a civil and environmental engineer and member of the faculty at the Virginia Polytechnic Institute.

The analyses in both English and Spanish, as well as background information on the scientists, can be found at http://www.chevrontoxico.com/

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Chevron Fraud Evidence Mounts In Ecuador

Bogus Lab Tests, Threats Against Plaintiffs Counsel, Ex Parte Meetings With Judge Paint Nasty Picture of Oil Giant’s Litigation Tactics

Amazon Defense Coalition
13 September 2010 – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karen Hinton at 703-798-3109 or Karen@hintoncommunications.com

New York, NY – Evidence of fraud by Chevron is mounting in Ecuador, dealing the oil giant a potentially crippling blow as it faces a potential multi-billion judgment for environmental damage, representatives of the Amazonian communities asserted today.

In a series of recent court filings in federal courts across the United States, the Ecuadorians suing Chevron for oil contamination in the Amazon rainforest have demonstrated the oil company faces an increasing array of problems, among them:

· Diego Borja, a Chevron contractor in Ecuador, ran a “dirty tricks” operation for the oil giant in Ecuador that attempted to ensnare the trial judge in a corruption scandal, according to taped phone conversations.

· Borja claimed that Chevron had “cooked” court evidence and that he would turn against Chevron if company officials did not pay him what they promised for videotapes he made of the judge in the lawsuit. Widely covered by the news media, the videotapes were later discredited.

· Chevron hired Kroll, the publicly traded investigations firm, to try to pay an American journalist to become an undercover spy for the company in Ecuador, according to a recent article in The Atlantic.

· Chevron’s lawyers had ex parte meetings with judges and have not denied having ex-parte meetings with court-appointed experts on the case – the exact same basis for Chevron’s false claims of “fraud” against lawyers for the plaintiffs.

· The plaintiffs also produced evidence that a court-appointed expert adopted many materials wholesale that were prepared by Chevron’s own expert without citation – the exact same charge that Chevron has leveled against the plaintiffs.

· Two Chevron officials are under criminal indictment in Ecuador for, according to the charges, conspiring to defraud the government by lying about the results of a sham remediation in the mid-1990s. Chevron’s own tests submitted into evidence show illegal levels of contamination at the so-called “remediated” sites.

· Due to a series of death threats from unknown sources, lawyers for the plaintiffs and their families are now protected with armed bodyguards.

Chevron is arguing in various jurisdictions around the country that any ex parte meetings between the plaintiffs and a court-appointed expert prove “fraud,” though they have failed to cite any order, rule, regulation, or law prohibiting such meetings under Ecuadorian court procedures. Legal experts in both Ecuador and in the United States have disagreed with Chevron’s argument.

“Chevron has not denied that its own lawyers met with court experts and has yet to deny the evidence that its lawyers met ex parte with judges in the lawsuit,” said Ilann Maazel, an American who is representing the Ecuadorians. “Why can Chevron meet ex parte with judges, but plaintiffs can not meet with an expert? This is hypocrisy with a capital “H”.

“Chevron’s true complaint is not with the Ecuadorian courts, but with the evidence of its own wrongdoing,” Maazel said.

Originally filed in the U.S. in 1993, Chevron requested the case be moved to Ecuador. Now that a decision is approaching and the evidence points to its culpability, Chevron is attempting to retry the lawsuit in the same U.S. court system it once rejected as inappropriate.

In a brief submitted to the Southern District Court of New York last week, attorneys for the Ecuadorians argued that Chevron had conducted ex parte meetings with court-appointed experts and that one of them, Gerado Barros, copied entire pages of a 2005 Chevron report into his expert report, entitled Prácticas y Reglamentos Internacionales Para el Uso y la Remediación de Piscinas de Campos Petroleros. Barros is one of several experts who have written about 100 reports, in total, that the court may rely on as evidence in the case. The majority of the reports show illegal levels of contamination, even at sites allegedly “remediated” by Texaco.

The plaintiffs assert that adopting materials directly from reports is not inappropriate, as long as the court-appointed expert is in agreement with the materials or is using them to explain or make a point. Such practice is common in U.S. courts, Maazel said.

Maazel said Chevron has yet to identify an “order, rule regulation, or law prohibiting” contact with experts.

Penn State law professor Catherine Rogers, a scholar of international arbitration and professional ethics, wrote on Opiniojuris.org, a well-respected online legal forum, that Ecuadorian “standards for the impartiality of court-appointed experts may treat such attendance (ex parte meetings) as acceptable, and perhaps not even necessary to disclose.....”

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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.

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