Chevron in Ecuador

The archive of the Clean Up Ecuador campaign website


Judge Orders Chevron CEO to Answer Questions about Company's Bribery and Toxic Destruction in Ecuador's Amazon

Kroll official also must answer questions about Chevron bribery

Amazon Defense Coalition

Amazon Defense Coalition
7 May 2013 - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Karen Hinton at +1.703.798.3109


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.