Got an Extra Leg to Stand On? Shameless Polluter Needs to Borrow It
The entire Ecuadorian Amazon was once a thriving ecosystem and home to thousands of species (including one called homo sapiens). But Chevron-Texaco’s operations have turned this living treasure into a polluted monument to greed and shortsightedness. If you haven’t already, please take a moment to click here and support Amazon Watch’s ChevronToxico campaign.
It’s time the company that profited from the Amazon Chernobyl take responsibility for the destruction those profits was built on.
In response to the campaign, Chevron-Texaco is ramping up its ongoing effort to weasel out of paying for the damage it caused in Ecuador. In a press release last week, the Chevron Corp. announced that “newly discovered evidence” shows that the Special Master appointed by the court to investigate the allegations, a gentleman named Richard Cabrera, did not disclose that he owns a remediation company that could benefit from the potential clean-up in Ecuador. Because of this nonexistent (and, by the way, previously disclosed) “conflict of interest,” Chevron is asking that the case be thrown out of court.
Steven Donziger, one of the good guys’ attorneys, asserts that this is just another of Chevron’s desperate, no-leg-to-stand-on attempts to reject any eventual court ruling against them. “Chevron is again trying to strong-arm the court by misrepresenting facts. This is part of an underhanded attempt to derail a trial Chevron is losing based on the voluminous scientific evidence.”
Since Cabrera’s research has exposed such unfavorable evidence against the corporation, Chevron has made 29 official motions to the court to attempt to disqualify him. However, the court has never accepted Chevron’s tortured arguments, recognizing them as transparent attempts to evade their liability $27 billion liability in the case.
Pablo Fajardo, another of the good guys’ lawyers, points out that Chevron failed to note that Cabrera had disclosed to the court that he owned a clean-up company before his appointment as Special Master. In fact, this detail was properly cited by the court as one of the very reasons that he was qualified to do the damages assessment in the first place!
To learn more about the case (and about why Chevron’s executives’ mothers are doubtlessly ashamed of their children), click here.