Chevron Ecuador: Plaintiff's Video Claims of Evidence Tampering Questionable

Eager to counter the damaging Crube movie film outtakes pointing to fraudulent action on the part of American Lawyer Steve Donziger (in photo with sunglasses), the Amazon Defense Coalition came up with a novel approach: revisionist history.

Via PR spokesperson Karen Hinton, who failed to respond to emailed questions sent while preparing this blog post, the ADC now says in a press release it was Chevron who committed fraudulent actions in oil cleanup, evidence tampering and "lies to U.S. judges." The problem is the videos the ADC refers to only show claims made by Steve Donziger years after Chevron left Ecuador, which was in 1992.

This is the latest salvo in the ADC's attempt to extort money from the American Oil Giant. Chevron was an active oil producer in the Ecuadorian Amazon River Delta region. But, after pressure to leave the nation, Chevron turned over its oil production facilities to the Ecuador-owned Petroecuador, including nummerous oil wells, to Ecuador in 1992 and, after a clean activity left the country.

Petroecuador took over the oil well sites and continued work. And that leads to the problems expressed today as being caused by Chevron, when they were actually caused by Petroecuador.

There are two sources for this information: a PDF file provided by Hinton and called "DATA ON TEXPET’S CLEANUP Prepared August 22, 2008 by Stratus Consulting Inc.," and the fact that Steve Donziger is on record admitting he had meetings with Petroecuador executives in the early years of his campaign of extortion to earn a multi-billion paycheck.  (A statement made because Donziger admitted he expected to become a billionaire from this effort.)

The PDF files, on page 7, admits that Petroecuador "made changes to the pits after June 1990 (when Texpet ceased operations)." The document refers to tests done at several pits years later, when Petroecuador operated on fields and using equipment once owned by Chevron.

But the problem is the document leaves Petroecuador's post-Chevron activity as a dangerous wild card, especially when the study reads "PetroEcuador changed “site conditions” after the initial remediation survey work."

How? By drilling oil? That's not explained at all.

Thus, it's difficult, if not impossible, to take the Amazon Defense Coalition's claims seriously. It looks more like a hail mary pass attempt after the opposition offense has intercepted the pass and scored a touchdown.

Stay tuned.