NoisyRoom.net

By: Bob McCarty
Bob McCarty Writes

“This case is the ultimate embodiment of ‘no good deed goes unpunished,’” said Charles A. James, executive vice president and chief legal counsel at Chevron Corporation, speaking about the 16-year-old, $27 billion lawsuit filed by the Amazon Defense Coalition against Chevron in Ecuador.

James shared the opinions above during a conference call with bloggers one day prior to an anti-Chevron protest set to take place tomorrow outside the company’s San Ramon, Calif., headquarters as a meeting of company shareholders takes place inside. Protesters will claim that Texaco, which was purchased by Chevron in 2001, left an “Amazon Chernobyl” behind in the form of environmental pollution after it ceased operations in the South American country in 1990. James begs to differ.

“When Texaco exited Ecuador, it did so in the manner that most people would want a responsible oil company to exit a country,” James explained. “At the conclusion of our consortium with the government of Ecuador, Texaco insisted on a full environmental audit that was then memorialized into something called a Remediation Action Plan, and then we went ahead and carried out our responsibilities on that plan — closed pits, closed well sites, we did everything that you can imagine. The government inspected our work.

“The only snag in this whole situation was that our partner, the government of Ecuador, did not want to remediate the entire area, and so they asked us only to remediate the portion of the consortium area that corresponded to our roughly 37 percent interest. We did that, had it inspected, received a release from the government of Ecuador and left.

Charles A. James

“The government of Ecuador has really starved its oil operation of appropriate maintenance and proper oil field operational investment. That’s not something we say; that’s the testimony of, I think, their ministry of energy in 2005 or 2006. And they candidly admit that they never went about and cleaned up the remainder of the consortium area; moreover, during the course of the last 19 or so years, they’ve made the situation severely worse by poor oil field operations, thousands of spills, etc.

“Now, we find ourselves in a situation where a group of American trial lawyers have fully joined forces with the Ecuadoran government of Ecuador to try to shift that responsibility from the government of Ecuador really on to Chevron and its shareholders.

“The reason that the case has become so popular right now, I think, is that these trial lawyers — and the lobbyists who work with them — are really sort of trying to use the moment of our annual shareholders meeting as a point of pressure in an effort to get a settlement of the case,” James explained. “That has been their strategy from the beginning — again, not something we made up.

“In the very early stages of the case, we were able to obtain an e-mail from the plaintiff’s lawyers, reflecting how they intended to work with NGOs and others to try to pressure us into a settlement, and all of this stuff is taking place right now at a very feverish, because I think they view this as their moment.

“I think they’re taking the very, very unprecedented effort of really sort of attacking us with our investors, bringing together every anti-oil, anti-development NGO that they could find, and so we’re going to have a moment tomorrow, but this is par for the course with these particular individuals.”

See also:

‘No Good Deed Goes Unpunished’ (Part 2 of 2)

Click here to read more BMW posts about the lawsuit.