Thursday, February 2, 2012

Either You Did Or You Didn't

Fess Up Chevron

It's a pretty simple question, Chevron. Did you change this document to look like this document so you could hide from the court huge amounts of life-threatening toxins at your old well sites in Ecuador? 

If you did, then it proves what the Ecuadorians have been saying since testing at the sites began in 2004 and 2005 during the long-running Ecuador trial: Chevron manipulated soil and water samples. In other words, the company "cooked" evidence.

Readers of The Chevron Pit might ask, so what? The Ecuadorians won. They defeated Chevron in both U.S. and Ecuador courts, winning an $18 billion judgment to cleanup damages resulting from the company's deliberate poisoning of the rainforest's soil and water.

It matters because Chevron is trying to get an Ecuador-funded taxpayer bailout from an international arbitration tribunal, run by private lawyers. See here for details. In Chevron's twisted view of the world, the Government of Ecuador should pay the $18 billion judgment. 

But the government, of course, is the people. Now that it’s lost in legitimate courts both in the U.S. and in Ecuador, Chevron turns to a body with no authority to have the Ecuadorians pay to fix a horrific mess of gigantic proportions of its own creation.

Only an oil company would think it could get away with this.

The Government of Ecuador has this smoking gun document and will present it to the tribunal, which explains why Chevron is parsing its statements carefully. 

In response, Chevron's lawyers wrote a long letter to the Ecuadorians' lawyers, making all kinds of nasty threats, but they never denied Chevron doctored the document to induce two professors of note to endorse fake testing methods.

In an open joint letter, the two professors, who are on the Chevron dole, also failed to put to rest the charges that Chevron used the altered document to dupe them into endorsing the company’s sampling protocol. 

They are Dr. Pedro J. Alvarez currently the chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Rice University, and Dr. Douglas Mackay, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Davis.

The smoking gun document shows that Chevron's legal team concocted a plan to guarantee the company would find only "clean" soil samples from dozens of contaminated well sites inspected by the court while "dirty" samples would be sent to a secret laboratory where they would not be disclosed.

But don't take our word for it. Check out a comparison of a "before" and "after" document. You decide. 

Meanwhile, Chevron, a simple yes or no answer will suffice.

Speaking of “cooked” evidence, read this old Chevron Pit to see how Chevron’s fraud in Ecuador is coming into focus. 


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