2,000 Lawyers Failed To Block Chevron CEO John Watson From Court Deposition On Ecuador Case

After spending hundreds of millions of dollars for 2,000 lawyers and legal assistants to fight a group of impoverished Ecuadorian indigenous people in a historic oil contamination lawsuit, Chevron's CEO and Chairman of the Board John Watson will finally have to answer questions under oath about the environmental crimes committed by an oil company he recommended Chevron purchase. 

This, of course, assumes that U.S. Federal Judge Lewis Kaplan, who has sought to stop the Ecuadorians from enforcing their judgment, does not overrule a magistrate judge's decision issued yesterday, allowing the deposition to go forward. 

As the architect of the plan to purchase Texaco in 2001, Watson knew about Texaco's admission that it had dumped 16 billion gallons of toxic production water into the Ecuador rainforest's waterways. He knew about the 900 unlined pits that Texaco built to store pure crude. He knew about the internal audits Texaco conducted that showed massive contamination.  Yet, he pushed the merger and, as a result, inherited the largest environmental lawsuit in the world's history and urged a trial in Ecuador, only later to cry foul when he, his lawyers and his private investigative firm, Kroll, failed to undermine the Ecuadorian judicial system. 

It is about time that Chevron's highest ranking officer speak to the injustices that Texaco committed and Chevron tried to hide in Ecuador's rainforest.

Below is a statement issued by the Ecuadorians who won a $19 billion judgment against Chevron and are seeking to enforce that judgment in Argentina, Canada, Brazil and Ecuador.

JUDGE ORDERS CHEVRON CEO TO ANSWER QUESTIONS

ABOUT COMPANY’S BRIBERY AND TOXIC DESTRUCTION

IN ECUADOR’S AMAZON REGION

Kroll official also must answer questions about Chevron bribery

Chevron CEO John S. Watson, who perhaps more than anyone knew about the grim history of deliberate and negligent dumping of oil and toxic chemicals by his company into the soil and streams of Ecuador’s Amazon region, will not escape his day in court. 

A magistrate appointed in the long running lawsuit brought by Chevron in New York in the aftermath of a $19 billion judgment against the company in Ecuador ruled today that Watson must be deposed by the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case.   He likely will be deposed later this month.

“There is little doubt that Mr. Watson has relevant knowledge,” said Magistrate James Francis, noting that Watson led the company’s successful merger of with Texaco in 2002, well after the suit was filed by indigenous Ecuadorians.  Their lands and livelihoods were disrupted and health endangered by Texaco’s dumping billions of gallons of waste in the Amazon valley of northern Ecuador over more than 30 years.  The ruling is here.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV denied motions by Chevron to block depositions of Watson and also from an official from the corporate spy firm Kroll, which was implicated in a bribery scheme in which an attorney from Chevron and an unnamed Kroll official provided a cache of cash to a corrupt provincial judge in Ecuador, Alberto Guerra, paying him for a failed effort to influence the judge who ultimately decided the case and assessed the huge judgment against the oil company.  A recorded transcript of that meeting can be found here and a news release recounting it here.

The lawyer, Andres Rivero, and the corporate investigator brought $20,000 – the Kroll official called it “money that's in the suitcase” --to pay Guerra for testimony against the plaintiffs, as revealed in recordings made by a Kroll operative in Ecuador and attached to a recent motion filed in the court in New York.    That meeting occurred on July 13, 2012, in Quito.

Judge Francis also found that an unnamed official for the oil and gas division of Kroll also must appear for depositions.  It was an uncommon victory for the plaintiffs in the New York case where presiding Judge Lewis Kaplan has kept his thumb heavily on the scale on behalf of the oil company, said Pablo Fajardo, lead counsel for the Ecuadorians who brought the case.  “Now CEO Watson and Kroll’s investigator can confirm what we already know:  that Chevron’s bullying and bribery  is part of a strategy hatched in Ecuador even before the ruling to avoid paying for remediation and the health and other needs of the affected people,” Fajardo said.

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Dumb Chevron Lawyer Tapes Himself Offering A Bribe In Ecuador

Chevron apparently got caught with its hand in the cookie jar again in its long-running campaign to weasel out of its $19 billion legal obligation in Ecuador.

Only this time the company tripped all over itself, producing a tape in federal court made by company lawyer Andres Rivero that can only be described as staggering in its stupidity.

This might keep the fraud division of the U.S. Department of Justice at least a little busy for the next few weeks.

The tape shows that Rivero brought a suitcase full of cash to Quito to pay off an Ecuador judge in exchange for favorable testimony. See this explosive press release here, which is also copied below in full.

We previously reported that in 2011 the oil giant offered a $1 billion bribe to Ecuador’s government to illegally quash the lawsuit. The judgment was based on overwhelming scientific evidence that Chevron deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest.

We now know that Chevron tried to pay $20,000 to an American journalist to spy on the plaintiffs, has conducted espionage surveillance to intimidate New York lawyer Steven Donziger, has threatened Ecuador judges with jail time, has tried to extort testimony from scientific consultants in the U.S., and has paid more than $2 million to an Ecuadorian operative to try to entrap Ecuadorian judges in a bribery scandal.

Of course, that’s on top of Chevron’s admission that it dumped 16 billion gallons of benzene-laden “water of formation” into the rivers and streams of the Amazon and then lied about the resulting financial risk to its shareholders, which prompted calls for an SEC investigation, which prompted a shareholder revolt last year against CEO John Watson which almost cost him his job.

These guys never seem to learn. Rivero and a Chevron operative named Sam Anson were outed earlier this year by an Ecuadorian newspaper for trying to intimidate and buy off judges in Ecuador. This is happening as the oil company desperately tries to beat back asset seizure actions in Canada, Brazil, and Argentina related to its refusal to pay the Ecuador judgment.

Please delight in reading about the details of this latest Chevron bribery scandal courtesy of Rivero, a Miami-based former prosecutor who, no doubt, has been paid millions by Chevron to risk his career for the company.

Andres, please let us know as soon as possible whether you think this assignment was worth it.

Here is the link to the press release on CSR Wire. A longer version follows below:

Chevron Offered Suitcase Full of Cash to Ecuador Judge In Exchange for Testimony, Documents Reveal

PRESS RELEASE/Fenton Communications
Contact: Bill Hamilton, bill@fenton.com
Phone: 202.641.0350/202.789.7755
Posted: May 1, 2013

New York, New York -- An American lawyer working for Chevron brought a suitcase full of cash to a meeting with a former Ecuador judge in an apparent attempt to bribe him for favorable testimony to help the oil giant evade its $19 billion Ecuador judgment, an explosive new court filing from the oil company reveals.

A Chevron investigator taped the meeting between Chevron lawyer Andres Rivero and Ecuador Judge Alberto Guerra, which took place in Ecuador’s capital of Quito in July of 2012. Chevron recently filed a transcript of the meeting in U.S. federal court as part of the company’s discovery obligations in a related “fraud” case brought by Chevron against the Ecuadorians.

Rivero, a former federal prosecutor, says on tape that he brought to the meeting $20,000 cash in “money that's in the suitcase” to pay Guerra for allegations that the Ecuador plaintiffs were involved in the writing of the judgment in the case. When asked by Rivero if $20,000 was enough, Guerra replied “Couldn’t we add a couple of zeroes to that?”

In an earlier court filing, Chevron admitted it ended up paying Guerra $38,000 for the information plus over $300,000 more for “protection” and “expenses” including relocation to the U.S. – or about ten times the annual salary of a judge in Ecuador and well in excess of Guerra’s $500 per month in expenses he admits to incurring.

Lawyers for the Ecuadorians called the cash offering further proof that Chevron was paying bribes in Ecuador for false testimony and said Chevron should be investigated for violations of the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and federal witness tampering statutes. The U.S. Department of Justice previously fined Chevron after finding it violated the FCPA in Iraq.

“We’ve always known that Chevron can only bully and bribe its way to favorable testimony but now we have even more undisputed evidence of this malfeasance,” added Pablo Fajardo, lead counsel for the plaintiffs in Ecuador. “Ethical corporations don’t send their people to meetings carrying suitcases stuffed with cash.”

Worse still for Chevron, Guerra admitted in the transcript that he recently had been made sick by drinking water from a well “polluted with oil” from areas of Ecuador’s Amazon that Chevron has refused to properly remediate.

Chevron’s transcript also corroborates a recent affidavit from Ecuador Judge Nicolas Zambrano, who authored the judgment against Chevron. Judge Zambrano declared under oath that Chevron had used Guerra as a conduit to offer him a $1 million bribe to lie and testify against the rainforest communities.

In the transcript, a person identified as Chevron “Investigator #5” told Guerra “you get yours when a deal is reached with Zambrano”. The operative also admitted he offered to fly Zambrano out of the country to meet “a very high ranking person from Chevron” if he could come up with sufficiently damaging information to help undermine the judgment.

“Guerra is Chevron’s kind of witness,” said Craig Smyser of Houston, attorney for the Ecuadorians in the New York case. “The kind whose only question to the company is: how much will you pay me?”
“Chevron’s lies are coming back to haunt them,” said Fajardo. “This rogue company thinks it can bribe anyone in Ecuador to avoid paying for cleaning up our land but we will hold them accountable for the mess they left behind.”

Rivero himself has been under fire for serving as Chevron’s point person in a far-reaching espionage campaign organized by the private investigations service Kroll and exposed by a Quito-based newspaper, El Telegrafo. The El Telegrafo articles found that Chevron is using Rivero, a Kroll operative named Sam Anson, and an investigator named Yohi Ackerman "as secret agents" in Ecuador to "intimidate" former judges, government officials, and technical workers who were either involved in the eight-year Ecuador trial or are in a position to lie about the extent of oil contamination in the Amazon region.

Rivero was deposed about these and other issues last week under federal court order, but it is unclear if Chevron will make the transcript available or if the company will move to seal it from public scrutiny.

These latest revelations are not the first evidence of Chevron’s bribery attempts in Ecuador. Information surfaced in late 2011 in The Huffington Post that Chevron offered $1 billion to an Ecuadorian government official in exchange for an agreement that the environmental case would be quashed before a final judgment was reached. Sam Anson, featured in the El Telegrafo expose, was previously caught offering a $20,000 bribe to an American journalist to spy on lawyers for the plaintiffs, according to a report in The Atlantic.

“Chevron’s lies are coming back to haunt them,” claimed Javier Piaguaje, one of the Ecuadorian plaintiffs who is contesting Chevron’s fraud claims in Federal Court in New York. “This rogue company thinks it can bribe anyone in Ecuador to avoid paying for cleaning up our ancestral lands.”

“No matter how Chevron tries to spin this, law-abiding corporations simply don’t send their lawyers to meet with former judges carrying suitcases full of cash,” added Graham Erion, a US-trained corporate attorney who advises the rainforest communities in Ecuador on shareholder issues. “This transcript is just another embarrassing revelation for Chevron’s management team that is already facing the threat of strategic asset seizures in Brazil, Argentina and Canada.

“Chevron’s current management team is dragging the company’s brand through Ecuador’s oil-soaked mud, and lying about it to shareholders,” he added.


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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’s Secret Agent In Ecuador: Meet Sam Anson of Kroll

Last week The Atlantic Magazine, in an article by American journalist Mary Cuddehe, exposed the latest element of Chevron's world-wide campaign to escape liability for illegally dumping toxins in Ecuador: a bona fide corporate espionage scandal.

According to a firsthand account by Cuddehe, Chevron used Kroll (the world's leading publicly traded investigations firm) to help the company concoct a creepy plan to create a journalist spy ring in Ecuador's Amazon to try to undermine a potential multi-billion dollar judgment against the company for 26 years of toxic dumping.

This is consistent with Chevron's desperate behavior in Ecuador. And Kroll had the perfect man for Chevron's black-bag job: Sam Anson, the company's "Managing Director for Latin America & the Caribbean." The fact that this conduct was likely to violate the ethical rules of the legal and investigative professions was apparently of no instance to the company or to Anson.

How do we know the "Sam" in The Atlantic story is Sam Anson? Read on.

The Cuddehe article described "Sam" as a former free lance writer reporting on race and hip hop… a former American journalist… someone in his mid-40s… who carries himself with "the ease that comes with professional achievement". He was also described as a Kroll operative working for Chevron.

Well, that seems to fit Sam Anson neatly. A former reporter before going over to the dark side (check out a Vibe magazine article written by "Sam Anson" on race and hip hop here, and Anson's LinkedIn profile lists him as a former "investigative reporter" for various publications), Anson has a long history with Kroll. He has been with the company for a decade, moving from Managing Director of the company's Los Angeles unit to his current position – at least according to his LinkedIn profile. But we can't give you a link for that – Anson deleted it sometime last week after the article appeared. (You can still catch a glimpse on Google's Cache, if you hurry…) And a simple Google search of his name gives us a bunch of pictures of Mr. Anson (which we've conveniently pasted into this blog), and a bunch of articles (here and here) citing Anson as Kroll's Managing Director for Latin America & the Caribbean.

As a former reporter, Anson knew that if he could find a reporter willing to lie, he would have the perfect spy. So he tried to recruit Cuddehe, a youngish reporter in her 20s based in Mexico City.

Cuddehe, an Iowa-born graduate of Columbia University with a Masters degree in Journalism, has published articles in The New Republic, the Miami Herald, and The Associated Press. She spoke Spanish and was a legitimate journalist – the perfect "pawn" (in her words) for Anson and Chevron.

Anson flew Cuddahe to Bogota and put her up at Chevron's expense in a luxury hotel. Anson then told Cuddehe that he wanted her to go to Lago Agrio, Ecuador (the site of the trial) and pretend to be writing a story about the case, while secretly funneling information back to Chevron.

Cuddehe wrote about Anson's attempt to hire her in The Atlantic:

"At first I thought I was underqualified for the job. But as it turned out I was exactly what they were looking for: a pawn."

"…there was a reason [Chevron] wanted me… If I went to Lago Agrio myself and pretended to write a story, no one would suspect that the starry-eyed young American poking around was actually shilling for Chevron."

Chevron's decision to pay journalists to lie as part of a spy campaign is "disturbing evidence of questionable if not outright illicit conduct by Chevron and Kroll" according to Jonathan Abady, a lawyer for the plaintiffs. Abady noted in a press release that Chevron had the option to use legitimate, above-board investigators, but instead choose to use a clandestine and unethical investigative strategy.

"Legitimate investigations are fine; paying journalists to lie is unethical and a direct attack on the credibility of all journalists worldwide," he said in a press release available here.

Abady also noted that Kroll investigators who misrepresent themselves at the behest of legal counsel could be violating the ethical rules of the legal profession, subjecting Chevron's lawyers to sanctions in the United States. Hew Pate, Chevron's General Counsel, needs to explain the situation.

Chevron's actions shouldn't come as a surprise. The company has been embroiled in a steady procession of scandals as it has engaged in unethical and potentially illegal activity in its efforts to escape liability in Ecuador. Just last year, the Amazonian communities accused Chevron of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act by engaging in a "sting" operation where a bribe was offered to help remove the trial judge from the case. An investigation determined that the "sting" operation and bribe offer was made by a long-time Chevron contractor, Diego Borja, who worked under the direction of Chevron's lead Ecuador lawyer Adolfo Callejas and the Chevron vice-president supervising the trial, Ricardo Reis Veiga (now under indictment in Ecuador for criminal fraud).

Borja has a long history with Chevron in Ecuador – earlier this year, Santiago Escobar, a childhood friend of Borja's - publicized taped conversations he had with Borja where Borja brags about the criminal acts he had conducted on Chevron's behalf. Among the items that Borja bragged about? Falsifying evidence at trial and facilitating a Chevron bribe of Ecuadorian army officials in 2005 to fabricate a charge that local indigenous leaders were planning a terrorist attack against Chevron's lawyers, forcing the cancellation of a critical judicial inspection of a contaminated Chevron well site.

Borja is now residing in San Ramon, California – just a few blocks from Chevron's headquarters – where the company stashed him away to keep him out of reach of the subpoena power of the Ecuadorian courts he conspired to undermine. He lives in a luxury villa that backs up to a golf course.

Chevron's actions are irresponsible, unethical, and potentially criminal. But this is a company that dumped (by its own admission) more than 18 billion gallons of toxic "produced water" directly into the waterways and environment on which tens of thousands of people rely – so it isn't expected to care about little things like ethics and corporate responsibility.

Chevron should stop spending millions of dollars on spies, and recognize the fact that it has a moral, ethical, and legal duty to clean up the catastrophe it left in Ecuador.

Sam Anson: who among Chevron's law firms is running you? Gibson Dunn, Jones Day, or King & Spalding? And exactly why did you delete your LinkedIn profile after Cuddehe published her article? And which journalists are you paying to go undercover in Ecuador?

Come clean, Sam Anson.

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Chevron Outed for Corporate Espionage Spy Scandal in Ecuador’s Amazon Rainforest

Chevron's latest desperate attempt in its effort to avoid a potential $27.3 billion liability for illegal dumping in Ecuador's rainforest? The company has taken to trying to hire journalists in an unethical attempt to derail the litigation. Take a look at the below press release from the Amazon Defense Coalition explaining the company's entanglement in the spy scandal below:

Chevron Outed for Corporate Espionage Spy Scandal in Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest

Atlantic Magazine Exposes Offer to Journalist to Go Undercover to Sabotage $27 Billion Environmental Case

LAGO AGRIO, Ecuador--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Chevron, long accused of engaging in an illegal dirty tricks campaign in Ecuador, tried to recruit an American journalist to take part in a corporate espionage spy ring in Ecuador's Amazon to undermine an expected multi-billion judgment against the oil giant in a high-profile environmental lawsuit, according to an article published in the latest issue of The Atlantic.

Mary Cuddehe, an Iowa-born graduate of Columbia University with a Masters degree in Journalism, published an article documenting that the investigative firm Kroll has been running an espionage operation in Ecuador on behalf of Chevron, which faces a $27 billion damages claim for creating what experts believe is the worst oil-related catastrophe on the planet.

A Kroll employee offered Cuddehe $20,000 for six weeks of work to appear as an independent journalist while working as an undercover spy in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. Lago Agrio is the jungle town in the Amazon where the trial is being held at Chevron's request after the case was originally filed in New York federal court several years ago.

The Kroll employee, identified as a former journalist named Sam, paid for Cuddehe to travel to Bogota where the case was explained and she was offered the money in the suite of a luxury hotel. Cuddehe said in a blog that she has published articles in The New Republic, the Miami Herald, and for the Associated Press.

"Last February, I got an offer from Kroll … to go undercover as a journalist-spy in the Ecuadorian Amazon," wrote Cuddehe in the article, titled "A Spy In the Jungle".

"At first I thought I was underqualified for the job. But as it turned out I was exactly what they were looking for: a pawn."

She added: "…there was a reason [Chevron] wanted me… If I went to Lago Agrio myself and pretended to write a story, no one would suspect that the starry-eyed young American poking around was actually shilling for Chevron."

Representatives for the Amazon communities who are victims of the environmental damage blasted Chevron and Kroll for engaging in corporate espionage. The article suggested that numerous Kroll employees were working on the Ecuador project from a base in neighboring Colombia.

With headquarters in New York, Kroll is considered the largest investigative firm in the world and is publicly traded.

"This is disturbing evidence of questionable if not outright illicit conduct by Chevron and Kroll, possibly subjecting Chevron's lawyers to sanctions or penalty in the U.S.," said Jonathan Abady, an American lawyer who represents the plaintiffs. "It is hard to imagine Kroll engaging in this conduct alone without oversight from Chevron's lawyers."

"Legitimate investigations are fine; paying journalists to lie is unethical and a direct attack on the credibility of all journalists worldwide," he added.

Abady noted that Kroll investigators who misrepresent themselves at the behest of legal counsel could be violating the ethical rules of the legal profession, subjecting Chevron's lawyers to sanctions in the United States.

Events described in Cuddehe's article fit with a larger pattern in recent years of unethical and potentially illegal activity by Chevron to undermine the rule of law in Ecuador. The company has admitted to deliberately dumping more than 18 billion gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon when it operated an oil concession from 1964 to 1990.

Last year, the Amazonian communities accused Chevron of violating the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act in Ecuador by engaging in a "sting" operation where a bribe was offered to help remove the trial judge from the case. An investigation determined that the "sting" operation and bribe offer was made by a long-time Chevron employee, Diego Borja.

Chevron later paid to move Borja to a luxury villa close to Chevron's global headquarters in California to avoid questioning by Ecuadorian prosecutors.

Once in the U.S., Borja was taped in a telephone conversation with childhood friend Santiago Escobar as saying Chevron was "cooking" evidence in the Ecuador trial, using fake soil samples, and representing its own laboratory as independent when in fact it was operated by Chevron agents. He described himself to Escobar as being in charge of Chevron's dirty tricks campaign in Ecuador.

Borja also admitted to Escobar that Chevron bribed an Ecuadorian army official in 2005 to charge local indigenous leaders were planning a terrorist attack against Chevron's lawyers, forcing the cancellation of a critical judicial inspection of a contaminated Chevron well site.

Information relating to the Borja sting operation has been turned over to the U.S. Department of Justice.

In 2006, lawyers for the Amazonian communities were hit with a series of anonymous threats that prompted protest letters from the International Commission of Jurists and the United Nations.

The U.S. law firms employed by Chevron to defend the Ecuador trial are Gibson Dunn, King & Spalding and Jones Day. One or more of the firms likely is overseeing Kroll's work, said Abady.

"I have two words for Chevron's management and Board of Directors: Hewlett Packard," said Ilann Maazel, who represents the Amazonian plaintiffs in the United States. "This is outrageous and potentially exposes Chevron to even more liability."

In 2006 the Chairperson of Hewlett Packard's Board, Patricia Dunn, was forced to resign and fight criminal charges from California's Attorney General for authorizing espionage to find out the source of leaks to journalists. Chevron is a California-based company.

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