Chevron’s Ecuador $19 billion Pollution Problem Now An Issue in Florida Senate Race

Chevron's oil-related catastrophe in Ecuador (See here and here) is now an issue in the hotly-contested Florida Senate race between Democratic incumbent Bill Nelson and his challenger, Republican Connie Mack.  Chevron faces a $19 billion liability in the country for deliberately dumping billions of gallons of life-threatening toxins into the Amazon, decimating indigenous groups and causing an outbreak of cancer and other oil-related diseases.

This is the Senate race that Chevron and its friends at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce hope to buy by funneling huge dollars to Rep. Mack.

Last week, Sen. Bill Nelson attacked Mack in a television ad for letting Chevron try to help him buy a Senate seat.

Entitled "Hedge Fund Honcho," the ad goes like this:

NELSON: "I'm Bill Nelson and I approved this message." 

ANNCR: "Out-of-state billionaires and special interests have spent over $20 million to buy Connie Mack IV a Senate seat. 

Is it any wonder? In Congress, Mack is protecting Chevron Oil from a multi-billion dollar lawsuit over pollution of rivers and rain forests. And Mack filed a bill worth $2 billion for a Wall Street hedge fund speculator who happens to be one of Mack's biggest donors. 

Connie Mack. Deep in debt to the special interests" (YouTube, 10/11).

This campaign ad says it all. Given that Chevron contributes millions of dollars to Members of Congress and congressional candidates, it moves with ease in Washington, DC. It ranks third in political donations among the Fortune 500 (and is one of the largest contributors to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has spent $1.8 million to defeat Nelson.)

Not surprisingly, Chevron has harnessed a few Members of Congress to help its high-paid lobbyists push to cancel Ecuador's bilateral trade preferences in retaliation for the $19 billion judgment.  (Chevron fails to mention to its allies in Congress that it wanted the litigation tried in Ecuador’s courts after it was originally filed in U.S. federal court in New York.)

Mack, who is a member of the House Committee of Foreign Affairs, has introduced a bill to nullify the trade benefits for Ecuador on behalf of his friends at Chevron. (Mack also is helping other U.S. corporate interests in Venezuela and Argentina.)

Never mind that cancellation of the trade preferences for Ecuador would mean the loss of 375,000 jobs in the South American nation. Chevron is smoking mad about being held accountable in Ecuador for its human rights crimes.  Contributing to the campaign coffers of members of Congress so they will defend the indefensible is a small price to pay for the company to exact revenge against indigenous and farmer leaders in the Amazon.

Kent Robertson, Chevron's press flak, told Politico that if Ecuador’s President would just violate his own Constitution and pressure the country’s independent courts to dismiss the lawsuit, then Mack's bill would "disappear." See this article in Politico. In the criminal underworld, that’s called extortion.

This is the seventh year Chevron has engaged in a futile lobbying effort on Capital Hill to cancel Ecuador’s trade preferences because it must answer for its wrongdoing in court.

Despite its contributions and arm-twisting, Chevron has not succeeded because most Members of Congress see it the way U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez does. She called Chevron's lobbying racket over the Ecuador case "extortion."

Let's not forget the quote from the anonymous Chevron lobbyist who told Newsweek in 2008."We can't let little countries [like Ecuador] screw around with big companies like this…”

There’s a reason Mack is behind in the polls.

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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’s Ecuador Corruption and Ricardo Reis Veiga

The environmental crime committed by Texaco in Ecuador – and now defended by Chevron in a multi-billion litigation there – is intimately tied to the malfeasance of Chevron lawyer Ricardo Reis Veiga. Reis Veiga is known as the architect of Chevron's fraud in Ecuador. It is no coincidence that Chevron has hidden the formerly high-profile Veiga under the sheets for some time now, trying to keep him out of public view while the awful consequences of his misconduct play out in the trial in Ecuador and in the health problems of thousands of people.

To put it bluntly, Reis Veiga was Texaco's corporate hit man in Ecuador. He used fraud, money, deceit and the oil giant's raw power to help it evade responsibility for the deliberate dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon while Texaco operated an oil concession from 1964 to 1990. Reis Veiga, along with ten Ecuadorian officials with whom he is accused of conspiring, is currently under indictment for fraud in Ecuador for lying about the results of a sham remediation Texaco did in the mid-1990s.

While Reis Veiga supervised the trial in Ecuador, terrible strategic mistakes were made. Chevron took numerous soil samples that proved that the previously remediated sites were in fact not remediated, even though Reis Veiga and his colleague and Chevron lawyer Rodrigo Perez Pallares signed off on the clean-up. Under Reis Veiga's brilliant supervision, Chevron's local lawyers essentially proved the case of the plaintiffs.

For this brilliant legal work, Chevron has spent tens of millions of dollars in fees.

The latest issue for Reis Veiga is the role he played in directing Chevron employee Diego Borja in his failed effort to entrap a trial judge in Ecuador in a bribery scandal to derail the trial where the company faces a $27.3 billion liability.

The so-called "bribery" videotapes have been discredited since Chevron released them in August 2009. They do not show anyone taking a bribe; the judge never discusses a bribe. The two men who made the videotapes are not the good Samaritans Chevron portrayed them to be. American Wayne Hansen is a convicted felon and inveterate liar; Borja is a man who bragged to a friend that "crime pays" and said that Chevron "cooked" evidence in the lawsuit, created a dummy laboratory to process soil samples, and engaged in all sorts of malfeasance that if known in full would allow the plaintiffs to win the case in the time it takes him to snap his fingers.

Borja has worked for Chevron in Ecuador since at least 2004. On tapes recorded by childhood friend Santiago Escobar, Borja said he was hired by and took all of his direction from Chevron's Miami office headed by none other than the indefatigable Reis Veiga. Let's just say this type of behavior would be consistent with Reis Veiga's historical pattern. See transcripts of Borja's recorded conversations with Santiago Escobar, the childhood friend. (Transcript 6, October 1, 2009 p. 7-8; Transcript 2, October 1, 2009, pages 2-3)

Borja for years collected soil samples for Chevron during the Ecuador trial, for which he was paid $10,000 per month – a millionaire's wage in Ecuador. His wife, Sara Portillo, worked at the so-called "independent" laboratory that processed the company's soil samples and then presented them as "evidence" to the court.

In his conversations with Escobar, Borja said Chevron was concerned about a possible Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violation should anyone discover that the oil company had anything to do with the bribery scandal. The Act prohibits American companies from bribing or otherwise offering benefits to foreign government officials to obtain business.

Borja wrote in an online chat: "Imagine I disappear and say that everything is planned by the company…. They'll shit themselves, because the corruption law would apply in that case, and they'd close down their operations in the U.S." (9/15 online chat).

Chevron's management needs to bring Reis Veiga out from under the sheets to answer some basic questions about his relationship to Borja and the video scandal.

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LA Times Editorial: Chevron Should Be Prevented From Violating Journalist's Privilege

Chevron sues over 'Crude'

A documentary's unused footage, akin to reporters' notes, should be protected.

Journalism that serves society does not always spring from objectivity, nor is it always written from a distance. When Upton Sinclair exposed the conditions of Chicago's meat industry, he did so on assignment from a socialist newspaper. He went to work in grim stockyards and returned with "The Jungle." The result was a revolution in food safety and the founding of the Food and Drug Administration.

Sinclair's closeness to his story gave his journalism urgency and moral power. It was precisely the sort of work that deserves the greatest protection from corporate intrusion. That lesson, however, has been turned upside down by a New York federal judge who this week ordered a documentary filmmaker to turn over outtakes of his work to Chevron.

The man at the center of this important 1st Amendment battle is Joe Berlinger, a respected documentary filmmaker who launched a project in 2005 to chronicle a landmark lawsuit filed by Ecuadoran indigenous people seeking compensation for environmental damage. Berlinger's acclaimed documentary, "Crude," followed the case, focusing on the lawyers for the plaintiffs. Chevron, however, says several scenes reinforce the company's charge that those lawyers cooked up the case: In one, a lawyer for the plaintiffs meets with an expert witness hired by the government to estimate damages from oil in the Ecuadoran jungle; in another, a lawyer is shown meeting with the judge and remarking that such a meeting would be inconceivable in the United States but not in Ecuador, because there "this is how the game is played. It's dirty." Because just a fraction of Berlinger's footage made it into the final film, Chevron believes there was potentially more damaging material left on the cutting-room floor, so it sought to force Berlinger to hand over his outtakes.

Were the material in question notes gathered by a journalist in pursuit of a story, the journalist's privilege, which recognizes the societal benefit of allowing journalists to shield their unpublished notes, would almost certainly have protected it. So the issues were: Was Berlinger a journalist, and do the protections for notes extend to film outtakes? U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan sided with Berlinger on both points, concluding that the filmmaker covered a newsworthy event and disseminated his findings to the public — a fairly sound description of journalism in any form.

Nevertheless, noting that the journalist's privilege is a limited one, Kaplan ordered Berlinger to turn over the footage precisely because, paradoxically, Berlinger's close ties to the plaintiffs meant that he has material that Chevron is unable to get anyplace else. (Kaplan seems to have overlooked the presence of other witnesses in the filmed scenes.) Kaplan may be right that Berlinger has exclusive material, but forcing him to relinquish it turns the point of journalistic access on its head: If journalists must reveal what they learn but do not publish from those sources they cultivate most carefully, then sources will keep them at arms' length. This nation is better off because Sinclair was able to insinuate himself into Chicago's meatpacking plants; it will be better again if Berlinger prevails on appeal. And it will be better still when Congress passes a federal shield law that protects journalists and their sources.

Copyright © 2010, The Los Angeles Times

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Kennedy: "Exxon Valdez was an accident…What happened here in Ecuador was done on purpose."

Kerry Kennedy – daughter of Robert F. Kennedy – toured the contamination and pollution Chevron left behind in Ecuador this week. From the AP:

RFK's daughter backs Ecuadoreans in Chevron suit

(AP) – 5 hours ago

QUITO, Ecuador — Robert F. Kennedy's daughter sided with Ecuadorean Indians and farmers in their $27 billion environmental lawsuit against oil giant Chevron, saying Thursday after visiting former Amazon drilling sites that the case compares unfavorably to the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker spill.

Kerry Kennedy, who toured parts of the Amazon province of Sucumbios by invitation of the plaintiffs to witness ecological damage, promised to lobby hard back in the United States.

"When I return home, we'll mobilize the human rights and environmental communities," said Kennedy, who is president of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Human Rights. "We'll call on political leaders in the United States to investigate Chevron and its practices."

The plaintiffs, who say they represent 30,000 inhabitants of the region, are seeking damages for cleanup and to compensate for illnesses they attribute to oil-drilling contamination from operations carried out by Texaco.

Chevron Corp., which bought Texaco in 2001, says it was absolved of any liability by a 1998 agreement with Ecuador's government that followed a multimillion-dollar cleanup.

The plaintiffs contend the cleanup was a sham and say the agreement doesn't protect Chevron from claims by third parties.

Chevron must be held responsible and compensate the local populations, Kennedy told reporters in Ecuador's capital, Quito.

"Exxon Valdez was an accident," she said. "What happened here in Ecuador was done on purpose."

In a statement, Chevron invited President John F. Kennedy's niece to meet with its representatives and learn the company's side.

Chevron accused the Ecuadorean state oil company Petroecuador of being responsible for the damage, not Texaco. Petroecuador was a partner in the drilling consortium Texaco operated before pulling out in the 1990s.

Chevron has long claimed it can't get a fair trial in Ecuador. It contends the judicial system is corrupt and recently released tapes it claims implicate the judge in the case in a bribery scheme.

Judge Juan Evangelista Nunez denied any wrongdoing but nevertheless recused himself — likely delaying a ruling that had been expected later this year for a case initially filed in 1993 in a New York court.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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If you can’t earn a good reputation, you can always buy one…

It appears that corporate excellence isn't what you do anymore, but how much you're willing to pay. With a potential $27 billion judgment looming in Ecuador over oil contamination, Chevron has been working hard to hide its toxic legacy and promote itself as a corporation with a reputation worthy of honor.

But, instead of working to actually improve their image on the ground, Chevron has been hard at work currying favor at the State Department and throwing money at everything but the hundreds of pits of oil littering the most diverse region on the planet.

Recently Chevron announced a $5 million contribution for next year's Shanghai World Expo, after an appeal by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinajournal/2009/09/22/us-nearly-in-the-money-for-expo/

The company also paid for its own full-page, color Washington Post ad to congratulate itself on receiving the Richard C. Holbrooke Award for Business Leadership. Holbrooke, not surprisingly, now works at State, serving as the President's special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.
http://www.newsweek.com/id/205546/output/print

The oil giant has most recently gotten itself nominated as a finalist for the Secretary of State's Award for Corporate Excellence. http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/ps/2009/oct/130172.htm.
A stunning coincidence following, as it does, hard on the heels of these generous financial payouts.

To be clear – we're not arguing that contributing to various projects like these is a bad thing, only that Chevron cannot try to hide their bad acts in countries like Ecuador, Nigeria, and Burma by contributing some money to the World Expo and fighting AIDS in Africa. While those are worthy projects, the company cannot balance the scales of morality by doing some good over there while ruining people's lives and polluting lands over here. It's like going to McDonald's and ordering a Big Mac and large fries but getting a Diet Coke – sure, the Diet Coke is better than a regular Coke but it doesn't make the Big Mac any better for you.

But it seems like Chevron isn't interested in that message. Instead of adapting their policies to finally fulfill their legal and moral obligations and to be a better corporate citizen, Chevron has instead chosen the strategy of using its record-breaking profits to buy itself a good corporate reputation.

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Jim Hightower: CHEVRON SOILS ITSELF

Interesting commentary about the Chevron-Ecuador lawsuit by Jim Hightower today - take a look over at: Jim Hightower | CHEVRON SOILS ITSELF

Hightower notes:
"For a quarter of a century, Chevron's Texaco subsidiary crudely and willfully contaminated the land, water and people of this region with an oil extraction process so crude, careless, and deadly that it still stands as one of the world's grossest examples of corporate insensitivity."

Powerful stuff.

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Chevron Praised Ecuador’s Courts for years and years…

until the company stood to profit by trashing them.

It turns out that long before Chevron picked up their new theme that "Ecuador's courts are biased" (no doubt a message that was refined in countless focus groups before Chevron's P.R. firms started pushing it out to you, loyal reader) the company spent years praising the courts, in an attempt to get the case transferred down to Ecuador. Turns out that Chevron loved the Ecuadorian courts - loved them just until evidence started being filed that showed that Chevron was responsible for the environmental and humanitarian disaster in the region. As soon as that happened, Chevron started their current messaging that Ecuadorian courts are corrupt and biased. Hmm – seems convenient for Chevron that Ecuadorian courts turned biased just as the evidence started revealing the depths of the environmental and humanitarian crime committed in the region.

But read for yourself – we're posting here the 14 sworn affidavits that Texaco (which Chevron merged with in 2001) filed in U.S. Federal Court praising the Ecuadorian courts as fair and unbiased. You can see for yourself exactly what Texaco (and now Chevron) thought about the Ecuadorian judiciary - right up until the company had a $27 billion interest in trashing them.

This is Chevron's M.O. - do anything, and say anything, you have to in order to avoid having to take responsibility for your actions.

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