Despite an adverse court ruling out of Ecuador, Chevron continues to remain on the offensive against trial lawyers who are suing the company over environmental allegations that have been hotly disputed.  An Ecuadorian appeals court in Lago Agrio  upheld a ruling earlier this month ordering the company to pay $18 billion in damages to plaintiffs who claim the oil company is responsible for polluting the Amazon and damaging the health of local residents.

Chevron became a target for litigation after it took over Texaco in 2001. Farmers and tribe members claim Texaco damaged parts of the jungle with faulty drilling practices in the 1970’s and 1980’s. In response, Chevron officials have said that Texaco properly re-mediated the areas where it had operations. Moreover, the company has produced reams of evidence that demonstrate plaintiff attorneys have been operating in collusion with Ecuador’s judiciary to produce fraudulent rulings. Chevron has also sought international legal recourse with considerable success.

Under the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Agreement Treaty, a Hague Tribunal has ordered Ecuador to suspend enforcement of the ruling pending further investigation. Several federal judges in the U.S. have also ruled in the company’s favor. Chevron has also submitted a letter to Galo Chiriboga, Ecuador’s prosecutor general that documents the fraud and corruption allegations. The plaintiffs’ representatives including Steven Donziger, Pablo Fajardo, Juan Pablo  Saenz, Julio Priento and Luis Yanza worked in covert partnership with Judge Zambrano to craft a ruling  that would be favorable to their case, according to the letter.

Chevron’s evidence against the Ecuadorian court includes the following:

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The world price of crude oil has been on a roller coaster lately, gyrating above and below $100 a barrel. Several weeks ago, prices at the pump reached $5 a gallon in some places but seem to have settled down, at least temporarily, to less than $4 in many parts of the country. The elevated cost of gasoline—and of heating oil, aviation fuel and other energy products derived from “black gold”—understandably is a matter of great concern to most Americans.

Rising energy costs already have changed many families’ summer vacation plans, threatened to short-circuit the weak recovery from the Great Recession and, combined with recent increases in food prices, contributed to incipient inflationary pressures that foreshadow a lower standard of living and a return to the stagflation of Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

Fluctuations in crude oil prices are being driven mostly by uncertainty over supplies from oil-producing countries in North Africa and the Middle East, along with a weakening U.S. dollar and other political factors that largely are beyond the control of the much-maligned U.S. oil industry.

But they are not totally beyond Washington’s control. Just recently, President Obama reversed course once again, announcing policy initiatives that the White House claims will increase domestic oil production.

The president says he now wants to lease more drilling areas in the Gulf of Mexico and reduce bureaucratic delays in issuing permits for energy exploration and recovery.

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The Courthouse News Service reported Monday that Chevron Corp. asked a federal judge Friday to order the release of outtakes from Joseph Berlinger’s 2009 documentary, “CRUDE” (trailer below). Today, Judge Lewis A. Kaplan granted the San Ramon, Calif.-based oil giant’s request, leaving one question unanswered: Will the footage exonerate the company and bring an end to its maddening 17-year-old court battle in the South American country?

In the conclusion of a 31-page decision issued in the United States District Court of the Southern District of New York, Judge Kaplan wrote:

The Court expresses no view as to whether the concerns of either side are supported by proof of improper political influence, corruption, or other misconduct affecting the Ecuadorian As Justice Brandeis once wrote, however, “sunshine is said to the best of disinfectants.” Review of Berlinger’s outtakes will contribute to the goal of seeing not only that justice is done, but that it appears to be done.

Three portions of the documentary* highlighted by Chevron in their request to the judge involve Steven Donziger, the New York-based attorney leading the lawsuit against Chevron, Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa and Dr. Carlos Beristain, a one-time expert witness in the case:

A. Plaintiffs’ Counsel Meets with Expert Witness — Crude contains footage of a number of meetings that took place in the Dureno community of the indigenous Cofan people. A version of Crude “streamed” over Netflix depicts one such meeting, at which Dr. Beristain, an expert who contributed to Cabrera’s neutral damages assessment, is shown working directly with both the Cofan people and plaintiffs’ counsel. Berlinger, however, altered the scene at the direction of plaintiffs’ counsel to conceal all images of Dr. Beristain before Crude was released on DVD. The interaction between plaintiffs’ counsel and Dr. Beristain therefore does not appear in the final version of Crude sold on DVD in the United States.

B. Plaintiff’s Counsel Interferes with Judicial Inspection — In another scene of Crude, Donziger, one of plaintiffs’ lead counsel, persuades an Ecuadorian judge, apparently in the presence of Chevron’s lawyers and news media, to block the judicial inspection of a laboratory allegedly being used by the Lago Agrio plaintiffs to test for environmental contamination. Donziger describes his use of “pressure tactics” to influence the judge and concedes that “[t]his is something you would never do in the United States, but Ecuador, you know, this is how the game is played, it’s dirty.”

C. Plaintiffs’ Representatives Meet with the Ecuadorian Government — In another scene, a representative of the plaintiffs informs Donziger that he had left the office of President Correa “after coordinating everything.” Donziger declares, “Congratulations. We’ve achieved something very important in this case . . . . Now we are friends with the President.” The film then offers a glimpse of a meeting between President Correa and plaintiffs’ counsel that takes place on a helicopter. Later on, President Correa embraces Donziger and says, “Wonderful, keep it up!” Donziger explains also that President Correa had called for criminal prosecutions to proceed against those who engineered the Settlement and Final Release. “Correa just said that anyone in the Ecuador government who approved the so-called remediation is now going to be subject to litigation in Ecuador. Those guys are shittin’ in their pants right now.”

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Chevron oil company is being sued in Ecuador for $27 billion. It’s a big number. The gross domestic product (GDP) of Ecuador in 2008 was $54 billion. So $27 billion is 50% of the GDP of the entire country. And the $27 billion claim is sheer fantasy. The damage claim against Chevron is based on a gigantic scam.

Donald Moncayo (yellow shirt) of the Amazon Defense Coalition (the named financial beneficiary in the case) assisting the court's “independent expert” Richard Cabrera (leaning on tree) during a site inspection.

It goes back a while. Between 1965 and 1990, the old Texaco company developed oil concessions in Ecuador. (Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001, hence Chevron is now in the dock.) Between 1977 and 1990, Ecuador progressively nationalized Texaco assets, and transferred them to the state oil firm, Petroecuador.

In the early 1990s, Texaco and Petroecuador agreed to clean up a number of oil sites. Texaco kept its side of the bargain, and in 1998 the government of Ecuador certified that Texaco successfully cleaned up its share of the operations.

Nonetheless, in 1994 a group of U.S. attorneys sued Texaco in the U.S. They made novel legal claims for “environmental justice.” Eventually, the case was dismissed in the United States and a new case was filed against Chevron in Ecuador.

The Ecuadorean court appointed an “expert witness” to make factual findings and to calculate damages. Turns out that the “expert” is a mining engineer named Richard Cabrera, who has direct financial ties to the plaintiffs and as we learned this week, hidden ties to Petroecuador.

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The third step in Robert Creamer’s ten-step plan for imposing universal health care on America, according to his prison memoir, is to attack the private insurance industry: “Our messaging program over the next two years should focus heavily on reducing the credibility of the health insurance industry and focusing on the failure of private health insurance.”

Accordingly, Creamer’s spouse, Rep. Jan Schakowsky—whose campaigns Creamer has assisted through his Strategic Consulting Group—declared at a rally for health care reform in April 2009 that she would “put the private insurance industry out of business.”

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