On Tuesday, integrated energy company Chevron Corporation (CVX) announced that it had "newly discovered" evidence that the court-appointed Special Master who conducted a damages assessment, Richard Cabrera owns a remediation company in Ecuador that stands to benefit from a clean-up should the plaintiffs win the case and called upon the court to reject the report of Richard Cabrera, which recommended that Chevron be ordered to pay $27 billion in damages.
In a court filing in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, Chevron said Cabrera is co-founder, general manager, majority stockholder, and legal representative of an oilfield remediation company, Compañía Ambiental Minera-Petrolera S.A., which is registered to perform oilfield remediation and other services for Ecuador's state-owned oil company, Petroecuador.
Chevron said Cabrera failed to disclose these business interests and hid his relationship, and that he stands to gain from what was supposed to be unbiased work for the court.
"For three years, Mr. Cabrera has concealed clear financial conflicts of interest that disqualify him from acting as an independent and objective evaluator of the evidence in the case," Chevron vice president and General Counsel Hewitt Pate said. "While Mr. Cabrera's financial interests alone are sufficient grounds for his report to be rejected, his intentional concealment of those interests further demonstrates that the entirety of his work lacks honesty, integrity, or credibility."
Chevron said the Amazon Defense Front, the named financial beneficiary of the lawsuit, directly and improperly paid Cabrera more than $200 thousands for his work and nearly 90% of Cabrera's $27 billion figure is allocated to issues that he was not directed to examine and that are unrelated to the actual claims in the Ecuador lawsuit.
Chevron said it previously challenged Cabrera's lack of qualifications as well as the biased and baseless substance of his report. Now that Cabrera's clear conflicts of interest are revealed, Chevron has demanded that the court strike his entire involvement in the case.
Chevron's claims relate to the environmental lawsuit currently pending against the company in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, where Chevron's subsidiary, Texaco Petroleum Company participated until 1992 as a minority member of a consortium that explored for and produced oil under contracts with Ecuador and Ecuador's government-owned oil company, Petroecuador.
Richard Cabrera was named in 2007 by an Ecuadorean judge presiding over the case to study the pollution data, assess the effects of alleged contamination on people and the environment and suggest a cleanup plan.
CVX rose $1.18 or 1.68% and closed Tuesday's regular trading at $71.31.
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