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 P.R. Campaign Gets It Wrong Again

Last week Chevron's P.R. mavens were at it again – this time spinning out a number of carefully edited and selected outtakes from the documentary "Crude" to as part of an all-out assault on the lawyers for the 30,000 Ecuadorians suing the company for destroying an area of the rainforest the size of Rhode Island. Chevron is trying to intimidate the lawyers by using the edited film clips as the basis for fraud charges that are a cynical and desperate 11^th-hour attempt to escape liability by any means necessary.

(Recently, Chevron got access to the private film outtakes of celebrated documentarian Joe Berlinger from his award-winning documentary "Crude" – in a highly criticized, unprecedented assault on the First Amendment. After a long court fight, Berlinger surrendered the film to Chevron after the company promised not to use it for any purpose other than litigation. Take a look at this post here.)

Chevron has claimed that the video outtakes show that the plaintiffs' lawyers have manufactured the lawsuit against the company out of "smoke and mirrors" that are "all bullshit" and are simply an extortion racket to get money from the oil company. Over the last week the company's lawyers and public relations specialists have been working bloggers and journalists to try to push this view as far and wide as possible. Among Chevron p.r. firms is Hill & Knowlton, which used the same playbook for the tobacco industry, and Creative Response Concepts, which invented the Swift Boat ads that targeted John Kerry.

Of course, Chevron's not telling the truth about what the video outtakes do show. In fact, any viewing of the actual film footage – and not Chevron's edited, hand-picked, out-of-context scenes - shows exactly the opposite. Even the concept where the plaintiffs' attorney is making the comments Chevron has zeroed in on is in the context of a methodical outlay of the massive amount of the scientific evidence proving the company's guilt for creating the world's worst environmental disaster. Chevron has not disputed this – but it has refused to release the entire scenes, or the unedited video on which it was basing its public relations assault on the plaintiffs.

Nor, of course, does Chevron publicize the hundreds of hours of outtakes provided by Berlinger that point clearly to its own misconduct in Ecuador.

This shouldn't surprise anyone. Chevron has a long history of playing fast and loose with video, using misleading and mischaracterized film footage to try to score public relations points. Almost a year ago, Chevron spliced and diced footage that it claimed showed a bribery scheme in Ecuador – a claim that was later completely discredited as a company "dirty tricks" operation. Before that, Chevron paid a former CNN anchor, Gene Randall, to produce a video about the lawsuit that appeared to be a legitimate "investigative reporting" newscast, presumably to trick viewers into thinking they were watching an independent report on the issue.
The company has proven it will stop at nothing to try to find a way to evade its liability in Ecuador – earlier this week The Atlantic reported that a freelance reporter for the publication was flown to Columbia and offered $20,000 to go undercover on behalf of the company.

For all of the efforts to attack the lawsuit, it is interesting what Chevron has not done: focus on the evidence that clearly prove its responsibility for the worst oil-related contamination on the planet.

After more than 17 years of litigation, Chevron has not seriously disputed the scientific evidence that conclusively shows it is responsible for creating the world's worst oil-related disaster. In the Ecuador trial, more than 64,000 chemical sampling results – 80% of which were provided by Chevron's own scientists – and a 200,000 page trial record has produced a mountain of evidence showing the extent of the contamination. The evidence is clear: over 26 years of operations, from 1964-1990, Chevron produced a legacy of environmental destruction that is at least twice as large as the BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico in sheer size.

It is time for Chevron and its bloggers to stop misrepresenting film clips, quit the public relations battle, and take a look at the hard science that proves it is responsible for the horrible contamination.

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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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