In an action that comes as no surprise to anyone, an Ecuador appeals court confirmed the decision by Ecuador to award an $18 billion damage award to Ecuador. Ecuador’s court, long accused of bribery and beset with scandal, would not dream of going against the wishes of that country’s President Rafael Correa.
Ecuador’s state-run oil company plans to spend $70 million cleaning up polluted sites in the Amazon jungle, a move that may include areas that a company owned by Chevron Corp. (CVX) is accused of polluting.
Petroecuador plans “to clean up the environmental pollution from all the petroleum areas currently operated by Petroecuador, which may include areas polluted by private companies, including among them Chevron,” Petroecuador’s general manager Marco Calvopina told Dow Jones Newswires. “If we clean up our sites but next to them there are areas polluted by others, it won’t be very helpful.”
Chevron General Counsel Hewitt Pate said he welcomed the announcement as a sign of the country’s commitment to its 1995 agreement with Texaco.
“Petroecuador’s $70 million remediation budget, which covers an area larger than that of Texaco’s remediation, is within a reasonable cost range under U.N. standards,” he said in a statement.
San Ramon-based Chevron praised a recent decision by Ecuador’s government-owned oil company, Petroecuador, to complete the cleanup of oil-contaminated sites for which Petroecuador is responsible.
Petroecuador has set a budget of $70 million to clean up its sites in an area that is larger than the sites that Chevron is responsible for cleaning up. Chevron became responsible for an oil cleanup when it bought Texaco, which had petroleum operations in the Amazon jungle of Ecuador.
Chevron is defending against a multibillion-dollar legal action in connection with oil contamination in the region.
Chevron Corp. officials Friday lauded the announcement made this week that Ecuadorian state-oil company Petroecuador will clean up tracts of the amazon allegedly polluted by Texaco.
Petroecuador will spend $70 million to clean up oil and toxic materials Texaco left behind in the country, which some claim hurt the wellbeing of locals in the region and hurt the environment. The topic has been an on-going legal case between locals in Ecuador and Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001.
Ecuador’s state oil company Petroecuador said on Monday it will clean up areas in the Amazon jungle at the heart of a lengthy legal battle in which Chevron was ordered to pay $18 billion damages.
Ecuador’s state oil company Petroecuador announced plans on Monday to clean up parts of the Amazon jungle at the heart of a lengthy legal battle in which Chevron was ordered to pay $18 billion damages.
A federal appeals court, in an order filed Tuesday, denied a recent motion by the Ecuadorian plaintiffs suing Chevron Corp. to extend its stay to all proceedings before a lower court.
“Upon due consideration, it is hereby ordered that the motions to extend this court’s stay to all proceedings before the district court are hereby denied without prejudice to renewal once the after the district court decides Chevron’s attachment motion,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit wrote in its two-page order.
Ecuador president, Rafael Correa, threatens to nationalize fruit exporters that don’t fall in line with his policy:
Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa, has threatened to nationalise Ecuadorian banana exporters that acquire fruit outside the official framework and fail to comply with the country’s official price.
At the site of the Chevron Ecuador trial we see:
Ecuador exported 8.63 million barrels of crude oil in December 2011, up 17% from 7.38 million barrels a month earlier, the Central Bank said.
All the oil was exported by Ecuador’s state-owned companies.
Revenue from Ecuador’s crude oil exports totaled $909 million in December, up 10% from $826 million the month before.
Another newspaper weighs in on freedom of speech issues in Ecuador, site of the Chevron Ecuador trial. The New York Times and The Washington Post also editorialized in recent weeks against President Rafael Correa’s actions:
An attack on freedom of the press anywhere is an attack on freedom everywhere.
Such an assault is under way in Ecuador, a nation ruled with a heavy hand by a lightweight dictator who seems to wish he were Hugo Chavez of Venezuela.
The target: El Universo, a 90-year-old Guayaquil newspaper, one of the largest in Latin America and a leading voice for freedom and democracy in the region.
Government of Ecuador and Petroecuador, the country’s state owned and run oil company, sign agreement to increase oil output in the country where the Chevron Ecuador trial has taken place:
President Rafael Correa presided over the ceremony, in which Petroecuador head Marco Calvopiña and the representatives of the two winning consortiums inked the deals.
Ecuador state-run oil company Petroecuador late Tuesday signed 15-year contracts with both consortia, which will invest about $1.7 billion over the next five years.
“We condemn the latest reforms to Ecuador’s electoral law, which are so broad that they could, among other things, effectively prevent reporting on election matters for three months prior to the vote,” said Carlos Lauría, CPJ’s senior Americas program coordinator. “This deprives citizens of their right to stay informed on election news and represents the latest step in the deterioration of press freedom under Correa.”
Ecuador’s energy minister says U.S. and Argentine companies are investing nearly $1.7 billion to boost production in the country’s two main oil fields by 40,000 barrels a day.
The Lago Agrio judgment was procured through a corrupt and fraudulent scheme, much of which was captured on film and memorialized in the plaintiffs’ representatives’ own emails and correspondence. Their misconduct includes fabricating expert reports, manufacturing evidence, bribing and colluding with court officials, waging a campaign of intimidation against judges, and even ghostwriting parts of the verdict itself. Evidence of these crimes has been provided to Ecuador’s courts and prosecutors, but authorities there have taken no corrective actions.
Any uncertainty caused about potential liabilities regarding the recent Brazilian oil spill and Ecuador court cases is overdone.
Organizations like the Inter American Press Association, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers and Reporters Without Borders have asked President Correa to stop his assault on journalists and the media, like that facing the newspaper El Universo, which could set a dangerous precedent. Publications like The New York Times, Washington Post, Spain’s El País, El Espectador in Colombia, and La Nación in Argentina have also questioned Correa’s actions. Even Ecuador’s previous presidents have asked that Correa respect freedom of expression.
President Rafael Correa of Ecuador is leading a relentless campaign against free speech, harassing his critics, forcing independent broadcasters off the air and hijacking the nation’s courts in his bid to bankrupt the country’s largest newspaper.
Reporters are frequently assassinated in Mexico, and a populist government in Venezuela has driven some journalists into exile. But press freedom advocates say that no other country in Latin America is moving so fast and on so many fronts to restrain the media as tiny, banana-producing Ecuador.
President Rafael Correa, an American-educated leftist economist who has forged close alliances with Cuba and Iran, has filed a defamation lawsuit that might put the three directors of the country’s largest newspaper in jail and shutter their 90-year-old paper. The government has cobbled together a framework of laws and constitutional reforms to limit press independence, free expression groups say, while building a media conglomerate to disparage critics and counter independent media reports.
The appeal, read Chevron’s announcement, “establishes that the lower courts violated the Ecuadorian constitution by refusing to take any corrective action in response to the extensive fraud and corruption committed by plaintiffs lawyers and their representatives.”
Fadel Gheit, an analyst with Oppenheimer who follows the company, agrees.
“If I was ruling Chevron, I would fight until the very last minute of my job, and make sure the next guy behind me will not pay them anything,” Gheit said. “They are a bunch of scam artists.”
Gheit said Chevron has no choice but to fight the lawsuit to the end, because paying would set a precedent that other people across the globe could try exploiting.
Since taking office in 2007, Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa has been in a war of words with the media in his country. He’s used archaic libel laws to pursue criminal charges against the owners of El Universo and a columnist at the newspaper. His government has pushed through a law that severely restricts the media’s ability to cover political campaigns and elections; indeed, it goes so far as to ban any media reports that can benefit or hurt a candidate. And now he’s set his sights on international media observers.
U.S. oil giant Chevron Corp. said it would pursue another appeal of a multibillion dollar judgment against in Ecuador for environmental contamination.
The company said it has submitted a petition to have a review performed by Ecuador’s National Court of Justice, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.
