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.
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.
Don’t believe it.
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