Word: chevron
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...Party lay out a brazen bribery conspiracy. They tell Hansen and Borja that $3 million in payoffs will be required to land a cleanup contract, divided evenly among Nuñez, Correa's office (including, said one of the men, the President's sister) and the plaintiffs. The Chevron complaint also fingered Correa's chief legal adviser, Alexis Mera, in the scheme. At a press conference on Sept. 1, Mera denied being involved and suggested that Chevron was simply trying to divert attention away from a case it knows it will probably lose. "The government won't succumb to these...
...scandal promises to delay the completion of a trial that has already spanned two decades and two continents. It began in the early 1990s in New York, after settlers and indigenous tribes in the Amazon oil towns of Coca, Lago Agrio and Shushufindi accused Texaco - which was bought by Chevron in 2002 - of recklessly dumping crude and wastewater into their lakes and rivers, seriously damaging the public health and livelihoods of tens of thousands of people. A court-appointed expert estimated the total damage to be a remarkable $27 billion, a figure Chevron says is baseless...
...Although Chevron insists that it had no part in the secret videotaping, it turns out that Borja has worked for the company as a logistics contractor. "This entire episode reeks of a Nixon-style dirty-tricks operation, and Chevron's fingerprints are all over it," says Steven Donziger, a New York lawyer and adviser to the Ecuador plaintiffs. In his TV interview, Nuñez said that if Chevron "sent an employee" - the contractor Borja - that may mean a crime has been committed, since the law forbids him from meeting the parties in the lawsuit...
Ironically, Chevron in 2003 requested that the trial be moved to Lago Agrio, believing the conservative Ecuadorian government at the time would be more sympathetic. Indeed, in 1998 the government had declared that Texaco's $40 million cleanup of the sullied Amazon area was satisfactory. But three years later, Correa was elected, and Chevron has complained ever since that his administration has interfered in the case and prodded the judges overseeing it - including Nuñez, who took over last year - toward the plaintiffs...
...Chevron executives have been under increasing pressure from shareholders who are fearful of an unfavorable verdict. But the scandal probably has the Correa administration chafing as well, especially since a tainted legal system could compromise its efforts to win most-favored-nation trade status from the U.S. Congress this year...