An article published by the Wall Street Journal on January 15, 2010, quotes Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson as saying that Texaco "never waived its rights to resist a verdict that is the product of fraud and a broken legal system." He was refering to the promise made by Texaco (purchased by Chevron in 2001) to a New York court that it would abide by an Ecuadorian court's ruling in a lawsuit brought against the oil giant for severely polluting the rainforest.
Losing on the merits of this case at every possible turn, Chevron has decided it can’t win and so backpeddles on its legal obligation to abide by an Ecuadorian court's pending judgment by seeking to taint Ecuador's judicial system with cries of "fraud". It thereby hopes to set the scene for a U.S. court to review this obligation that was previously laid down by the ruling of a New York court in return for allowing the case to be transferred to Ecuador. The fraud clearly lies with Texaco for it's utterly deceptive "remediation" of the contamination it left in it's wake after 26 years of unregulated drilling. Two of Chevron's attorneys are under indictment in Ecuador for their part in this remediation scam.
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In an article by Kenneth P. Vogel published by Politico on November 16, 2009, Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson is quoted as saying that the fact that one of the individuals who made a secret video in an attempt to derail the lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador is a convicted felon "doesn't change what was caught on film. We have a judge who is corrupt."
The judge has never been proven corrupt. In the two meetings where the judge is taped, he is asked a full THIRTEEN times whether he is going to rule against Chevron, and every time respods that he has not yet decided how he is going to rule. At the end of the video you hear him saying "Yes, sir" off camera, but it is unclear what he is referring to. Chevron has allowed itself to become a party to an illegal recording in an obvious sting operation with the result that the company's questionable role in this dirty tricks operation is being investigated by both Ecuadorian and U.S. authorities.
And in Washington DC, Chevron has been lobbying Congress and the U.S. Trade Representative to threaten Ecuador's trade preferences under the Andean Trade Preferences Act unless it does something to put a stop to the $27 billion lawsuit. In an eye-opening admission quoted in the Politico article, Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson says, "If we were able to call a timeout and make the lawsuit disappear, then this entire issue disappears."
Thus he shamelessly admits that Chevron's lobbying is nothing short of blackmail to pressure the Ecuadorian government into intervening in the case filed on behalf of 30,000 rainforest residents by the Amazon Defense Coalition: You call off the ADC and we'll stop seeking to revoke your trade preferences with the U.S.
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In an October 29, 2009 Associated Press article exposing one of the men involved in a video sting operation designed to strengthen Chevron's side as a felon, Chevron spokesperson Kent Robertson said that the company "is not associated" with Wayne Hansen and has given him no money.
Yet Chevron accepted his videos as truth after "careful investigation" and, as the AP article says, has offered to pay for Hansen's security and legal fees relating to the videotapes. That's not quite what most people would understand as "giving him no money".
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On October 15, 2009 The Minority Report blog reported that Chevron's spokesperson Kent Robertson claimed that “Texaco was unwilling to simply walk away” from the environmental and human disaster it had caused by its oil drilling in Ecuador and "remediated" 37.5% (the portion it felt was its responsibility) of the oil fields in question.
Contrary to what Mr. Robertson says, Texaco did not clean up the pits and indeed walked away from one of the worst contaminated areas on the planet. The pits that Texaco said it cleaned have toxic levels as high or higher than the pits not cleaned. Evidence has been filed in the subsequent trial to confirm this. Over 60,000 sample results have been entered into evidence, the vast majority showing illegal levels of toxic waste. A large number of these samples were gathered by Chevron itself.
The so-called remediation agreement is a fraud because Texaco simply put dirt into the pits to cover them up. This made the situation worse because people thought the pits were cleaned and often built homes upon them.
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In an October 9, 2009 article on a secret sting video recording, the New York Times quotes Kent Robertson as saying that “Chevron had no involvement in the videotaping. Chevron referred this matter to the U.S Department of Justice and Ecuador’s prosecutor general after making every reasonable effort to verify the evidence that was presented.”
All well and good, except that Chevron publically posted the videos on YouTube BEFORE informing U.S. and Ecuadorian authorities. Manipulative and political at best, unethical and calculating at worst.
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Kent Robertson is quoted by Bloomberg in a September 29, 2009 article saying: “Given the misconduct and obvious bias on the part of Judge Nuñez, it is clear that the court had to act. It would appear that Judge Nuñez’s colleagues have manufactured a means for Judge Nuñez to escape any sort of formal scrutiny or accountability.”
Yet, the Superior Court of Nuevo Loja has acted by accepting Judge Nuñez's request to be recused from the case. Chevron wanted him off the case and he is off. Now the court is "manufacturing" a way for Nuñez to escape scrutiny? This is patently untrue as the article itself makes plain: Nuñez is being investigated by Ecuador's Attorney General. But then, Chevron is also being investigated for its part in this sordid little video affair, so any deprecation of Ecuador's judicial system is in order for future deniable spin...
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Kent Robertson is quoted by the Associated Press in Business Week on September 29, 2009 as saying: "The case in Ecuador went off the tracks several years back and became illegitimate. The appointment of a new judge would not fix what is broken in this case."
Yet a sting operation against the previous judge led to Chevron demanding his removal if the trial could be considered legitimate. The judge recused himself, a superior court accepted the recusal, a new judge has been appointed (with a likely delay of some 7 months to bring himself up to date on the case - a delay that the oil giant desperately sought), and now Robertson is saying that, after all, the entire process is illigitimate. Chevron is required by a U.S. court ruling to accept the judgment of the Ecuadorian court, but has stated it has no intention of doing so. Now it has decided that the trial itself is not legitimate. The arrogance is remarkable and typifies the company's attitude toward developing nations: Chevron's law is more powerful than yours. Lump it.
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Kent Robertson told BNET in an article published September 27, 2009, that: “We don’t believe the U.S. should intervene in the Lago Agrio case”
This is patently false. In June of 2009, Chevron lobbied to have U.S. Andean Trade Preference Benefits for Ecuador cut using two former U.S. trade ambassadors (Mickey Kantor and Carla Hills) to approach officials at the United States Trade Representative they formerly headed to seek a cancellation of the benefits. They failed. If Chevron had succeeded in canceling the benefits, Ecuador’s government estimated the country would have lost 350,000 jobs. Similar lobbying efforts by Chevron in 2007 and 2006 that sought to enlist U.S. trade policy as a pressure point met stiff opposition from a number of Senators and Congressional representatives, and also failed.
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Kent Robertson says that Ecuadorian "Judge Nunez demonstrated a clear bias in the case”
Yet the Ecuadorian court has gone out of its way to accommodate Chevron in the 6 years since the case was moved to Ecuador. For years, Chevron repeatedly has tried to distort Ecuadorian law, present misleading evidence, create fake laboratory test results, politicize the trial by lobbying Ecuadorian and U.S. government officials to extinguish the claims of the plaintiffs, and employ extrajudicial pressure to intimidate the judge and court personnel – all with the goal of preventing a final judgment from being reached.
These tactics help explain why the trial process has lasted 16 years and why Chevron’s lawyers have promised the plaintiffs a “lifetime of litigation” if they persist in their claims. Despite this chicanery, Ecuador’s court system likely has afforded Chevron more due process rights than any defendant in the history of civil jurisprudence. The company alone has presented more than 50,000 chemical sampling results and produced almost 200,000 pages of evidence in a trial that has lasted five years in its Ecuador phase. It has been free to inspect any site it wants, turn over any scientific evidence it can
generate, present any witness from whom it wants testimony, and present any documentary evidence it can find.
It is the scientific data itself that has proven the case against Chevron, not any bias on the part of the judge or court.
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Kent Robertson recently criticized the documentary Crude as being "long on emotion and short on facts."
Crude director Joe Berlinger responded:
"I find Kent Robertson's comments about Crude to be extremely troubling, given the fact that he has yet to see the film. I have made multiple offers to screen the film for Mr. Robertson and his colleagues at Chevron, and my offers have been declined. Just last week, he told me that the company sees 'no meaningful value' in having a private screening, but they would 'simply wait until the film hits [their] local theatres.' Since Crude opened in New York on the same day the California-based Mr. Robertson made his comments to Reuters, I would be surprised if he has seen it, which makes me wonder why he is attacking the film.
"The comment that Crude is 'short on facts' is outlandish. The film goes to great lengths to give as much attention to the positions of each of the opposing parties in this landmark case as is possible in a feature length documentary. Stephen Holden of the New York Times -- among other prominent critics -- specifically cited this quality, saying, 'rarely have such conflicts been examined with the depth and power of Crude.' Perhaps the 'facts' that Mr. Robertson is referring to are not the talking points that his company has been working so hard to inject into the news cycle in the days leading up to Crude's release.
"While Crude attempts to present both sides of the legal case, it concerns me that Mr. Robertson continues to criticize the film's presentation of the story by obfuscating the accusations against his company. Mr. Robertson told Reuters, 'If you're seeing fresh oil today ... how can that be the responsibility of a company that stopped operating in 1990?' The systems and infrastructure that the plaintiffs say dumped billions of gallons of oil and toxic waste products into the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador were designed, built and operated for decades solely by Texaco (which merged with Chevron in 2001), according to the suit. Although the operation was later taken over by PetroEcuador, it is the theory of the plaintiffs' case that Chevron is responsible not only for the past pollution, but the current pollution as well, because they turned over a faulty system to the current operator. To ignore this would be to miss a key point in the story examined in Crude. While Mr. Robertson is not an attorney, he is surely aware of this major detail in the case against the company, which has now been going on for sixteen years."
