June 21, 2007
Court Order Violates Ecuadorian Law, Shows Pattern of "Unacceptable Potential for Bias"
Expert to Evaluate Existence of Environmental Damage, No Financial Assessment to Be Made
Nueva Loja, Ecuador, June 21, 2007 – Chevron today formally challenged the decision by Superior Court Judge Yánez to swear in Richard Cabrera as the sole expert in the evidentiary phase for determination of the environmental effects of activities related to the production of hydrocarbons in all the fields operated by Texpet of the environmental suit currently pending in Ecuador. Chevron's motion filed [today] explains that the ruling violates the Court's 2003 order, that the expert determination be conducted by the same group of experts who had conducted the judicial inspections in the first phase of the proceedings. Instead, the Court wholly accepted an extemporary plaintiffs' petition that a single unqualified expert be appointed.
"We are dismayed that the Court has yet again succumbed to plaintiffs' pressure tactics and violated the spirit and the letter of the law by appointing a lone expert, unfamiliar with the proceedings, to oversee the next evidentiary phase of the trial," said Ricardo Reis Veiga, vice president and general counsel of Latin America Products for Chevron. "The Court's repeated disregard for existing orders and acquiescence to plaintiffs' demands is another vivid example of the unacceptable potential for bias that threatens to undermine Chevron's right to a fair trial." The Court violated its past order – and Ecuadorian law – again in March 2007 when it allowed plaintiffs to waive their burden of proof by relinquishing 64 judicial inspections, thus leaving the evidentiary record incomplete.
Veiga continued, "Further, we don't see how any expert, no matter how qualified, can conduct extensive field work over numerous sites and submit an opinion on his findings in only 120 working days, when it took an average of 60 working days for court nominated experts to submit a single site inspection report to the Court. Nevertheless, we are heartened by the Court's determination that the expert's assessment be based on a firsthand look at the evidence. The overwhelming body of legitimate evidence gathered from the judicial inspections phase of this process demonstrates that Texpet's remediation was effective and that there is no significant health risk to humans from oil at any Texpet remediated site. We are confident that an honest review of the evidence will exonerate Texpet once again."
Veiga concluded, "While plaintiffs would like everyone to believe that this phase of the trial centers around how much Texpet should pay to conduct an additional remediation of its former sites, the fact is that the Court has never issued such an order, nor has it done so now."
Scope of Phase II: Determination of Environmental Impact
While judicial inspections in the first phase of the proceedings focused on the remediation of the individual sites, the expert determination should have a much broader scope, specifically: whether environmental damages have occurred, how and when they occurred, and what should be done to address them.
At no point has the Court specified that Cabrera will make a monetary evaluation of damages. Instead, the Court's order of the expert determination of the evidentiary proceeding states that the expert/s:
- "Will evaluate the environmental damage, if any, to primary resources: soil, water resources, vegetation cover, fauna and all the other elements of the environment, and detail their characteristics.
- Will specify, if possible, the origin of such damages, including the cause as well as the chronology.
- Will verify the possible current existence of substances that affect the environment and constitute or could constitute a danger to living beings or a threat to their subsistence and lifestyle.
- Will specify the work, activities and measures of a technical nature that should be conducted in order to clean up the environment, in the first place, and to restore it, to the degree technically possible, to the conditions that existed before the damage occurred.
- Will determine the methodological parameters for the restoration, and the standards or environmental goals to be achieved, as a function of the characteristics of each environment;" (emphasis added)
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