Chevron’s harassment continues

In an apparent effort to intimidate everyone involved in the lawsuit or whoever dares to mention the contamination in Ecuador, Chevron went to court to ask Joe Berlinger, the director of “Crude” for access to all the footage that was filmed while working on the documentary. There are over 600 hours of film which includes interviews with people involved in the lawsuit on both sides. Most of the material was filmed with an agreement of confidentiality.

Chevron hopes to find some material that can help their case.

The director says it would be a violation of his First Amendment rights and is prepared to fight Chevron’s request.

A hearing is scheduled for April 30 in federal court in New York.

Click here for more details

Joe Berlinger

“Crime Does Pay”

Chevron won’t stop at anything! It bends, breaks and disregards the law left and right.

Not happy about the results of tests showing how extensive the damage caused by Texaco is, Chevron just uses phony tests to produce more favorable test results.



Paying people to create fake companies to cover Texaco’s crimes and then paying them off to keep them quiet is just shameless! We should all sue Chevron for trying to make fools out of all of us.


Read the Chevron Pit blog for more details: http://thechevronpit.blogspot.com/2010/04/chevron-paying-whistleblower-diego.html

Lies, Lies, Lies

Shushufindi 38

I am not surprised to hear that Chevron told a whole bunch of lies to Columbia Journalism Review’s Martha Hamilton about the well site Shushufindi 38, featured on 60 Minutes last year. What amazes me is that it took Chevron a whole year to respond to the CBS program.
Chevron is trying to blame Ecuadorian oil company Petroecuador, even though the court documents show that Texaco was the only operator at this site.
Chevron also claims there is no contamination at Shushufindi 38, while the test show that levels of toxins are over 400 higher than legal limits in Ecuador and over 4,000times the legal limit as allowed in most states in the US!

You can read more at The Chevron Pit blog: http://thechevronpit.blogspot.com/2010/04/chevron-lied-to-columbia-journalism.html

Chevron has nothing to say

The plaintiffs in the Chevron lawsuit are calling on Chevron to comment on the charges of evidence tampering that its contractor, Diego Borja, made last week. Chevron should speak up and defend itself. Or, maybe it doesn’t because Chevron executives have no defense.

Read more here

Chevron's Con Man Exposed

Recordings of Diego Borja, a man who has been a contractor for Chevron for several years, revealing Chevron's darkest secrets have been released by Grant W. Fine, a lawyer and investigator hired by the plaintiffs. This is beyond shocking! Things Borja talks about prove what we knew all along...Chevron has been lying and hiding the truth to avoid responsibility for the mess in Ecuador.





Diego Borja


Here's a copy of the Amazon Defense Coalition's statement with more details:



Amazon Defense Coalition
For Immediate Release

April 6, 2010
Contact: Karen Hinton,
703-798-3109
karen@hintoncommunications.com

Chevron “Cooked” Evidence in Ecuador Environmental
Trial, According to Oil Giant’s Own Contractor

Diego Borja & Wife Worked For Chevron & Represented Oil Company’s “Independent” Lab To Test Contamination Samples

Washington, DC (April 6, 2010) – In a series of stunning revelations from recorded conversations, longtime Chevron contractor Diego Borja threatened to reveal damaging evidence “cooked” by Chevron in the environmental trial in Ecuador unless he received enough money for turning over secret videotapes to high-ranking Chevron executives in June 2009.

At one point, Borja laughed and said, “Crime does pay.”

Click here for copies of the report and press release http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/borja-report/

Borja’s disclosures are found in a report released today by Grant W. Fine, a lawyer and investigator hired by the plaintiffs. The report covers more than six hours of audiotapes and 25 pages of online chats that were given to the plaintiffs by Santiago Escobar, a childhood friend of Borja who made the recordings.

In the conversations, Borja said Chevron hired him to create four companies so his work for the oil company would appear “independent.” He suggested that the companies were connected to a laboratory to test contamination samples. Borja said the laboratory was not independent, but rather “belonged” to Chevron.

The investigative report also revealed that Borja’s wife, Sara Portilla, worked for Chevron for four years and represented Severn Trent Labs (STL), a US laboratory that Chevron described as an “independent” lab to test its contamination samples. Court documents obtained by Fine cite Borja and Portilla as representatives of STL. They both signed chain of custody documents with the Lago Agrio court that showed how the samples moved from the contamination site to the testing lab.

Borja – who Chevron always has cast as a good Samaritan – also said that Chevron is paying $6,000 a month in rent for his large home with a swimming pool that abuts a golf course in a gated community near Chevron’s headquarters. Borja said that Chevron is paying him the U.S. equivalent of the salary he made in Ecuador, which was $10,000, and is also paying the costs for a lease on an SUV and for personal security.

On the audiotapes, Borja said he has enough evidence to ensure a victory by the Amazon communities if Chevron failed to pay him what he was promised. Before turning over the videotapes to Chevron, Borja said he made sure Chevron “completely understood” he wanted payment for them.

He also said he had incriminating evidence against the oil giant stored on his iPhone and in an undisclosed location in Ecuador that he could use as leverage if Chevron betrayed him. Specifically, Borja said he has a notarized document that contains a version of events that would help the plaintiffs and that Portilla, his wife, is aware of the information.

Representatives of the Amazon communities reacted with shock to the audiotapes. “They prove at a minimum that Diego Borja is a real con man,” said Luis Yanza, President of the Amazon Defense Coalition, which represents the plaintiffs.

Yanza called on Chevron to investigate and disclose the information that Borja has stored on his iPhone and in Ecuador.

Yanza also called on authorities in Ecuador and the U.S. to examine the tapes and include them in their investigation of the videotaping scandal, which Chevron disclosed last August as a way to derail the trial. Chevron also cites the videotapes as evidence of corruption in its arbitration claim against the government of Ecuador, which Chevron filed in September, only four weeks after revealing the videotapes.

Escobar, who said he has known Borja since they were teenagers, said he decided to give the tapes to the plaintiffs because if “I keep quiet about immoral acts, then I become part of the immoral acts.” He said, “Diego always bragged to us about what he was doing with the testing samples to help Chevron avoid prosecution. Everyone knew he was Chevron’s dirty tricks guy. Overtime, I became more disgusted with what Diego was doing. The videotapes and his interest in switching sides was the last straw for me.”

Among other revelations, Borja said:

• If Chevron “tricked” him he would “immediately go to the other side… I have correspondence that talks about things you cannot even imagine, dude… I can’t talk about them here, dude, because I’m afraid, but they’re things that can make the [plaintiffs] win this just like that” at which point he snapped his fingers. He also said, “crime does pay.”




• Chevron had “cooked” the evidence and, if the U.S. judge who sent the case to Ecuador in the first place ever knew, he would “close [Chevron] down.”




• The energy giant used him to set up four dummy companies to make them appear to be independent of Chevron, but in fact they were controlled by Chevron.




• The laboratory that processed soil and water samples for Chevron to submit as evidence in the trial was not “independent” as the company represented to the court. “I have proof that they [the laboratories] were more than connected, they belonged to [Chevron],” said Borja, who also indicated he signed the contract to rent the house where Chevron’s laboratory was located.

Escobar also told Fine that Borja said he and wife stored testing samples in their refrigerator in their Quito office before mailing them to STL. (Test America, Inc., purchased STL in 2007.)

As a contractor for Chevron, Borja often worked at the contamination sites and collected evidence, yet he and Portilla also signed chain of custody documents with the court as STL representatives. Portilla signed them as an STL Project Manger and used the email address, sportilla@stl-inc.com

• Borja indicated that he and a person from Chevron, whom he referred to as his Florida-based boss, lied to gain entry into the independent laboratory that was processing the soil and water samples for the plaintiffs during the trial. (Yanza said he suspects the person is Ricardo Reis Veiga, a longtime Chevron lawyer based in Miami currently under indictment in Ecuador for lying about Texaco’s remediation results.)




• Borja said he has worked for Chevron on the Aguinda trial since 2004 and has signed numerous court documents – contrary to Chevron’s claim at the time it released the videos that Borja was a mere “logistics contractor” for the company. Portilla has worked for Chevron for four years, and his uncle has been employed by Chevron for 30 years. Borja also said he has worked for Chevron since he was 24 years old (nine years ago). Chevron’s legal team, Borja, his wife and uncle have office space in a Quito building his uncle owns.




• Borja conceded there was no bribe of the Ecuador trial judge, Juan Nunez, in the videotapes -- confirming the long held contention of the plaintiffs and contradicting Chevron’s assertions. With the videotapes, Borja said he did in “two days” what Chevron had been trying to do for a year, which was to get the judge dismissed.





• Borja also said Chevron promised to make him a “business partner” for turning over the tapes. When Escobar said he would have it “made” once he became a partner of Chevron, Borja responded: “That’s right, you dog… I mean, it’s a brass ring brother.”

Fine, a lawyer and investigator based in San Francisco, California, conducted the investigation. Fine also conducted an earlier investigation into Wayne Hansen, the so-called American “businessman” who claimed to be in Ecuador to identify contract opportunities for remediation work and partnered with Borja to videotape meetings with Nunez and others, using a spy pen and spy watch. Fine discovered that Hansen had never worked in remediation before, currently has no means of visible financial support and was sentenced to 32 months in a federal prison for drug trafficking over 275,000 pounds of marijuana.


About the Amazon Defense Coalition

The Amazon Defense Coalition represents dozens of rainforest communities and five indigenous groups that inhabit Ecuador’s Northern Amazon region. The mission of the Coalition is to protect the environment and secure social justice through grass roots organizing, political advocacy, and litigation. Two of its leaders, Luis Yanza and Pablo Fajardo, are the 2008 winners of the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Newest Statement of the Amazon Defense Coalition

The Amazon Defense Coalition has released a statement in response to Dr. Charles Calmbacher's bewildering testimony today.

Below are some quotes, you can read the release here:
http://thechevronpit.blogspot.com/2010/04/real-fraud-in-27-billion-environmental.html


“Dr. Calmbacher clearly agreed to have his signature placed on materials, including reports, that were to be submitted to the court, and he acknowledged he was actively reviewing the reports with our local, technical team. We are bewildered, frankly, at his testimony."

"On August 27th, 2004, a major media outlet quoted him as saying: ''Their defense is a lot like the tobacco industry saying there is no evidence linking smoking and lung cancer,'' said Charles Calmbacher, a certified industrial hygienist who works as an expert for the plaintiffs.”