Indigenous and farmer communities living in Ecuador's rainforest have sent the U.S. Department of Justice what they say is evidence of Chevron's fabrication of witness testimony and fraud during a RICO case in which U.S. federal judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled in favor of the oil giant. In his decision, Kaplan, who sits on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, said multiple court rulings in Ecuador ordering Chevron to pay $9.5 billion in damages were the product of "egregious fraud." In 2016, Kaplan's ruling was affirmed by an appellate court.
But, according to the Ecuadorians and their longtime human rights lawyer Steven Donziger, Kaplan's RICO ruling relied on fabricated testimony of judicial bribery delivered by a witness bribed by Chevron. Guerra was the star witness in Chevron's RICO argument, as his testimony was the only direct evidence that the company was able to put forward alleging that Judge Zambrano's judgment was procured by way of a bribe. In 2013, Guerra testified that he ghost-wrote rulings for Zambrano. But then, in 2015, Guerra recanted his accusations. "Yes sir, I lied there... I wasn't being truthful," he said when asked about his accusation that plaintiffs' legal team offered him a $300,000 bribe to rule in their favor. They are demanding that the DOJ launch a criminal probe into Chevron and the company's law firm in New York.
"The only fraud in the RICO case is Chevron’s fraud,” Donziger expalined.
"We have presented credible evidence that suggests Chevron presented false testimony to a U.S. federal court to undermine the Ecuador judgment against the company," said Patricio Salazar, a lawyer in Ecuador representing the affected communities. "This is a strong test of the capacity of U.S. prosecutorial authorities to address claims against a powerful U.S. company that was found to have caused grievous harm to vulnerable indigenous groups in the rainforest."
The Ecuadorian communities urge the DOJ to investigate "facts suggesting a conspiracy by the Chevron Corporation and certain of its counsel and executives to engage in witness bribery, perjury, and obstruction of justice to defraud a United States federal court and the Department of Homeland Security."
"Chevron systematically polluted our Amazon communities with toxic waste and then used its lawyers to manufacture fake evidence to try to evade paying a legitimate court judgment," said Carmen Cartuche, president of the Front for the Defense of the Amazon (FDA), the grassroots community-based group that brought the lawsuit against Chevron and which is executing the judgment against the company in Canada. "This type of behavior is not only outrageous, it appears to have crossed the line into criminality and it certainly warrants a serious investigation by the U.S. government. The investigation should encompass why a U.S. judge seems to have done nothing to stop what appears to be the corporate-led corruption of the judicial system."
Chevron officials threatened the villagers with a "lifetime of litigation" unless they dropped their case. When they did not, Chevron retaliated by launching the RICO attack in the United States against the Ecuadorian plaintiffs and their lawyers, suing them personally for an estimated $60 billion. (The use of federal racketeering laws, most commonly used against organized crime, has emerged in recent years as a tool corporations use to silence activist groups.) In March 2014, Judge Kaplan ruled in favor of Chevron's retaliatory RICO case, saying that Judge Zambrano's verdict was obtained through "coercion, bribery, money laundering and other misconduct."
But just months after the end of the trial, evidence emerged that largely undermined Kaplan's core findings. It turns out that Chevron paid $2 million to its star witness, who later admitted lying repeatedly about key facts on the stand. The appellate court did not review Kaplan’s factual findings, only examining the legal issues in play. The Ecuadorians have now gone to Canada, where Chevron has an estimated $25 billion in assets, to enforce the Ecuador environmental judgment by seizing company assets. Already, they have won three consecutive unanimous appellate decisions while Canadian courts have completely ignored Kaplan, despite the fact Chevron has tried to “export” his decision and have it accepted by Canadian judges.
Donziger is hopeful. "Chevron has tried to take the RICO decision into Canada and try to influence Canadian courts to look at the case negatively," he told AlterNet. Judge Kaplan's RICO ruling "has zero credibility and zero legal impact in Canada.… Ultimately, we believe they're going to have to pay the full amount of the Ecuador judgment via the Canadian Enforcement Action."
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