The Real Facts About Gibraltar: Chevron's Lies Boosted by Paul Barrett of Businessweek

Reposted from The Chevron Pit

Chevron's illusory $28 million judgment for legal fees against an empty shell investment vehicle owned by Ecuadorian villagers in the tiny protectorate of Gibraltar is worthless -- despite the attempt by Bloomberg's Paul Barrett to build it up with his incomplete and dishonest reporting.

After largely ignoring the stunning legal setbacks to Chevron in recent months in Canada and elsewhere regarding the $9.5 billion Ecuador pollution judgment against the company, Barrett this week posted a story about how Chevron won a default judgment in Gibraltar.  Gibraltar has only 30,000 people and four trial judges.

Nobody defended the company because the entire litigation is part of Chevron's nefarious effort to entrap the villagers in meaningless cases in irrelevant jurisdictions. Chevron wants to suck the villagers into doing anything except what really matters -- which is seizing company assets to pay for a long-awaited clean-up of lands where the oil major dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste.

In a misleading press release parroted by Barrett on the Businessweek website, Chevron General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate claimed the "Supreme Court" in Gibraltar ruled in favor of the company. What Pate didn't tell Chevron shareholders is that the Supreme Court of Gibraltar is actually a trial court with fewer judges than most small towns in America.

FPate tried to suggest in his press release that it was the highest appeals court in the country, which it decidedly is not. Pate of course never wants to talk about how Chevron polluted the crap of Ecuador and then tried to corrupt and sabotage the trial where it was held accountable.

The dormant investment vehicle targeted by Chevron was used years ago by the company's victims in Ecuador to fund the prosecution of their environmental claims against the oil giant. The villagers also planned to use it to aggregate proceeds of the judgment that would come with selling off Chevron's seized assets. The idea was to distribute the proceeds for an environmental clean-up in Ecuador without the Ecuadorian government interfering with the process.

The villagers chose not to divert their limited resources from Canada, where they have a real chance of collecting the entirety of their historic judgment. Chevron has $15 billion worth of assets in the country and the Supreme Court recently gave the green light for the villagers to go after them, dealing a devastating blow to Pate's blocking strategy.

"We must be disciplined and focus on seizing Chevron assets to force the company to comply with orders from the courts in Ecuador where the company insisted the trial be held," said Luis Yanza, an Ecuadorian community leader. "We will not fall into the trap of defending against frivolous cases that Chevron chooses to initiate in irrelevant jurisdictions."

With the help of corporate sympathizers in the journalism world like Barrett, Chevron's beleaguered management team is using the Gibraltar ruling to try to present a false picture of "progress" in the litigation. That is all part of an attempt by Pate and Chevron CEO John Watson to keep company shareholders and the financial markets from belching too loudly about the company's growing risk in Ecuador.

Chevron is on its heels in Canada and in the United States. Chevron's star witness in its retaliatory "racketeering" case in the U.S., Alberto Guerra, recently admitted lying on the stand to try to frame New York lawyer Steven Donziger in a bribery scheme in Ecuador. In apparent violation of federal law, Chevron had paid the witness $2 million for his testimony. Chevron lawyers coached Guerra for 53 consecutive days before allowing him to present his false testimony.

A concrete example of Barrett's dishonesty is how he used only a small portion of a written statement given him by Yanza, the internationally renowned Goldman Prize winner. The statement explained why the Gibraltar judgment has no impact on the case.

Here is Yanza's full statement as sent to Barrett:

Chevron's default judgment is against a dormant investment vehicle. We believe this judgment has zero value other than as a public relations stunt designed by Chevron to project the false appearance of 'progress' in a litigation where the company recently suffered multiple setbacks, including an admission by its star witness that he testified untruthfully in the RICO case and a decision by Canada's Supreme Court allowing our communities to try to seize company assets

While after two decades of litigation Chevron has yet to pay even one dollar to the thousands of people in our country that it harmed, it is no small irony that Chevron rushed to a courthouse in a far-flung jurisdiction to try to collect millions of dollars in fees that it has paid to its army of lawyers. Rather than engage in a multi-jurisdictional campaign of evasion, Chevron's management team would better serve company shareholders by complying with the Ecuador judgment so that the humanitarian crisis afflicting our communities can be addressed immediately.

This is the only part of Yanza's statement that Barrett quotes in his story:

While after two decades of litigation Chevron has yet to pay even one dollar to the thousands of people in our country that it harmed, it is not small irony that Chevron rushed to a courthouse in a far-flung jurisdiction to try to collect millions of dollars in fees that it has paid to its army of lawyers. 

Journalists of course have a right to use only parts of statements in their stories. But Barrett's long history of uncritical service to Chevron's narrative understandably makes us skeptical of his motives. In an obvious conflict of interest, Barrett last year testified in favor of Chevron before the U.S. Congress while reporting on the case.

Barrett's latest article repeats yet again a false thematic narrative almost always found embedded in his reporting. Barrett suggests that Chevron's retaliatory racketeering case against Donziger and his clients in the U.S. somehow amounts to an "exoneration" of the company's environmental crimes and fraud. Nothing could be further from the truth.

The reality is that Chevron made a mockery of justice in the RICO proceeding. The trial judge, Lewis A. Kaplan, arrogantly disparaged the affected communities and excluded any evidence of Chevron's toxic dumping in Ecuador. He also refused to seat a jury and then accepted the paid-for testimony of Guerra, Chevron's discredited witness. The judge knew nothing of Ecuadorian law or procedure and let Chevron abuse the process throughout.

Kaplan also failed to disclose his own investments in Chevron when he presided over the case. The entire proceeding reeked of racism and was reverse-engineered to favor the oil company.

Ultimately, the RICO judgment -- like the default judgment is Gibraltar -- does nothing to mitigate Chevron's risk from it pollution in Ecuador. But with Barrett promoting these judgments with a fundamentally false narrative, they do allow Chevron yet another bite at the apple on the public relations front.

That false hope is a major factor that allows Chevron's management team to spend millions on its army of lawyers to keep the litigation going even after it lost the case in its preferred forum.

Good work, Paul. As we have said before, you could make a lot more money by joining Chevron's public relations department.

(For more background on Barrett's distortions of fact and made-up scenes in his book about the Ecuador case, see this "notice of defamation" letter sent to him and his publisher.  For a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron in Ecuador, see here.)

Media Outlets: Chevron Polluted the Crap Out of Ecuador's Amazon Rainforest

Reposted from The Chevron Pit

According to numerous independent media outlets, Chevron indeed polluted the crap out of Ecuador's Amazon region.

We have long known that three layers of courts and eight appellate judges in Ecuador unanimously confirmed Chevron's responsibility for causing the extensive oil pollution found in the affected area. Less known is the array of respected journalists who independently have confirmed the evidence against Chevron by observing the damage with the naked eye.

These journalists include Scott Pelley of CBS News; Frank Bajak of the Associated Press; Simon Romero of the New York Times; Juan Forero of the Washington Post; and Patrick Radden Keefe of The New Yorker, among others.

Chevron, in what has to be one of the all-time great examples of a corporation sticking its head in the sand, continues to deny it has caused a major pollution problem in Ecuador. While those indigenous and farmer communities affected continue to suffer from high cancer rates, the company has refused to pay the $9.5 billion environmental judgment needed for a clean-up.

Chevron's position that there is "no problema" in Ecuador has no credibility.

Here is a brief summary, culled from the archives of from several major media outlets, of how Chevron impacted and continues to harm the environment in the area where it operated (under the Texaco brand) from 1964 to 1992.

CBS News Anchor Scott Pelley, on 60 Minutes in 2009, at an abandoned Chevron waste pit:

"Well, it rains here in the rainforest all the time, so there's water pouring out of [the waste pit] now. And if you smell the water, you can clearly smell the oil pollution in it. Runs right down the ravine... and right down into the stream, not 50 yards that way."

"Waste pits like those left behind by Chevron are supposed to be temporary and isolated from fresh water but in Ecuador one pit 60 Minutes saw has been there for 25 years and we found it's actually designed to overflow into streams."

Clifford Krauss and Simon Romero, writing in The New York Times in 2009:

Romero visited Chevron's waste pits and found that "black gunk from the pits seeps to the topsoil here and in dozens of other spots in Ecuador's Northeastern jungle."

"Evidence of [ChevronTexaco's] contamination is unavoidable at well sites near Lago Agrio and other towns in the region."

"Some pools of waste dug by Texaco combining noxious drilling mud and crude oil still lie exposed under the sun, seeping into nearby water systems."

Columnist Bob Herbert, writing in The New York Times in 2010:  

"What's not in dispute is that Texaco operated more than 300 oil wells for the better part of three decades in a vast swath of Ecuador's northern Amazon region... Much of that area has been horribly polluted."

Juan Forero, writing for the Washington Post, 2009:

"After a walk along a forest trail, [the guide] stopped at a pool that had been used by Texaco and poked a long stick into the black sludge. Waste also dripped out through a drainage pipe and ran down to a creek below."

"Chevron acknowledges that Texaco used unlined waste pits."

Patrick Radden Keefe, The New Yorker, 2013:

A guide for Keefe dug up "a fistful of black mud and held it so that the sunlight caught the telltale blue-orange tint of petroleum. At one fetid pit... he stepped gingerly onto the surface of the pool, where the solid matter in the produced water had congealed into a tarlike crust that was sturdy enough to support him.  Smiling a little, [the guide] shifted his weight from one foot to the other, until the whole surface began to undulate beneath him. He looked like a kid on a waterbed."

"[The guide] led us down a steep ravine to a creek. In the gauzy light filtering through the canopy, the water, which was only a foot deep, looked crystalline. [The guide] drove a stick into the creek bed and churned the mud until the water grew clouded by sediment... I skimmed my hand across the surface of the creek. My palm was coated in an acrid film."

Jim Wyss, writing for the Miami Herald, in 2011:

The guide "plunges his auger into the ground. Within a few inches the dirt gives off the pungent odor of petroleum. Within a few feet the dirt glistens with oil residue. When a few handfuls of the soil are dropped into a bucket of water, a thick oil slick coats the surface."

Frank Bajak, Associated Press, 2008:

In town of Lago Agrio, the epicenter of the damage, Bajak notes that "when the sun beats particularly hot... the roads sweat petroleum."

The guide "plunges a surgical glove-sheathed hand into the muck of one waste pit. He pulls up rancid, oil-coated leaves from surrounding saplings. A pipe juts out of another pit, dripping what looks like crystalline water that reeks of petroleum hydrocarbons."

Bajak notes "a fresh spill... dark and gooey. Bigger spills have smothered crops, choked birds, killed cattle."

Valerie Pacheco, AFP, 2011:

"[Lead named plaintiff Maria Aguinda] skeptically eyes the ongoing cleanup of a marsh just meters from her house, where workers dressed in oil-stained yellow overalls dredge thick black ooze into suction pipes."

"A strong petroleum smell permeates Rumipampa, home to nine families, some of whom complain of headaches."

Tom Levitt, The Ecologist, 2012:

"Billions of gallons of toxic waste from oil drilling in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s has polluted streams and rivers in the province of Sucumbios, used by indigenous communities for drinking, bathing, and fishing."

James North, The Nation, 2015:

"We set off into the rain forest. Oil pipelines of various sizes run alongside the roads; in one spot, you can count dozens of them, like strands of spaghetti. [The guide] started at Aguarico 2, a well that has been closed for years... The oil residue is still floating to the surface.  Then [we] marched down a steep slope to a stream, where you could see and smell the oil as well."

Chevron Enlists Convicted Felon Conrad Black to Help Its Defense in Canada

Reposted from The Chevron Pit

With evidence against it in the Ecuador pollution case mounting, Chevron has turned to none other than convicted felon and former media titan Conrad Black to help it try to block indigenous villagers from enforcing their environmental judgment in Canada.

A few days ago Black published an op-ed article in Canada that repeated Chevron's talking points and viciously attacked the rainforest villagers and their counsel. The article appeared in the newspaper Black founded in 1998, The National Post. In 2007, Black was convicted on fraud charges in Chicago related to the sale of his various newspapers, which at one point comprised one of the largest English-language media empires in the world.

A jury found that Black misled investors and looted company funds to support a lavish lifestyle that included luxury homes in several cities around the world. He was incarcerated in a federal prison before being deported to Canada and barred from entering the United States for 30 years.

(For more on Black's checkered background, see this story in Vanity Fair. For a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron in Ecuador, see here. For evidence of the high cancer rates caused by Chevron's pollution, see here. For a whistleblower video exposing Chevron's fraud in Ecuador, see here. For a sworn affidavit outlining some of Chevron's efforts to sabotage the Ecuador trial, see here.)

Chevron is up in arms that it might finally be held accountable in Canada and forced to pay the $9.5 billion Ecuador judgment after 22 years of playing a jurisdictional shell game. Canada's Supreme Court ruled unanimously in September that the Ecuadorians could try to enforce their judgment against company assets to force compliance with the court order in Ecuador.

The Canada Supreme Court decision has created major new difficulties for Chevron's avowed strategy to "fight until hell freezes over" and not pay the judgment it owes to those it harmed. After reviewing more than 100 technical evidentiary reports, Ecuador's Supreme Court in 2013 affirmed a lower court judgment that found Chevron had deliberately and systematically dumped billions of gallons of oil waste into streams and rivers relied on by local inhabitants for their drinking water. Cancer rates in the area have skyrocketed and untold numbers of local citizens have succumbed to the disease.

The Canada Supreme Court decision is typical in cases where a scofflaw debtor tries to evade a court judgment by selling off its assets in one country and moving them to another. That's what Chevron did in Ecuador after it fought for years to venue the trial there and accepted jurisdiction.

When a defendant loses a case and runs from the law, the judgment creditor always has a right to ask another country's courts to enforce their judgment against the defendant's assets. But according to Chevron and its new surrogate Mr. Black, an exception to this rule should be made for the long-suffering Ecuadorian villagers.

According to Black, the villagers should be blocked completely from Canada's courts.

Of course, if this were a commercial enforcement case involving one of Black's businesses that was getting stiffed in another country, he would be the first to cheer the Canada Supreme Court decision. He might consider the rank double standard he is proposing for the impoverished villagers who for decades have been victimized by Chevron's gross misconduct, as the U.S. show 60 Minutes documented in this segment.

More interesting to us is how Chevron seems to consider its options so limited in Canada that it turns to a convicted felon to argue its position in the press. Conrad Black likely was not the first person Chevron approached to write an op-ed. But he likely was the only one who agreed to do it.

Chevron recently got major egg on its face after the membership of Canadian Bar Association rejected an attempt by the company to intervene in its internal affairs and enlist the organization to file a "friend of the court" brief before the Canada Supreme Court. When Chevron's secret maneuver became public, the company was forced to withdraw the brief after it had been filed. Oops.

The enlisting of Black is not the only sign of Chevron's jitters in Canada.

The company's star witness, the Ecuadorian citizen Alberto Guerra, recently admitted lying on the stand in a farcical U.S. "racketeering" trial used by Chevron to try to taint the Ecuador judgment. In violation of federal law, Chevron paid Guerra $2 million in cash and benefits for his testimony. The company later conceded its lawyers coached Guerra for 53 days before he was allowed to take the stand. (The highly flawed decision in that case is on appeal.)

Without the discredited Guerra available to testify in Canada, Chevron has no real defense. Which is why Chevron and Mr. Black argue that Canada's courts should not take up the case at all.

For years, it has been obvious that Chevron will do virtually anything to evade paying the Ecuador judgment. That includes threatening judges in Ecuador, drowning the court with duplicative motions, presenting false testimony, paying fact witnesses, trying to bribe Ecuador's government to quash the legal case, obstructing justice, and filing retaliatory lawsuits against dozens of people who worked to hold it accountable. (For more background, see this article in the Huffington Post.)

Chevron's thinking that using a convicted felon will help improve the company's tattered image in Canada suggests a profound disconnect from reality. But it is depressingly consistent with the company's past behavior.

In 2009, Chevron used convicted drug felon Wayne Hansen in a failed attempt to entrap the Ecuador trial judge in a manufactured bribery scheme. Chevron investigators later spirited Hanson out of California to Peru to avoid a subpoena where he would have been forced to answer questions about the company's sordid attempt to undermine a trial it knew it was losing on the merits.

If Mr. Black wants to publicly debate us on Chevron's crimes and fraud in Ecuador without a company apparatchik whispering in his ear, we would be happy to make one of our advocates available.

Chevron Paying Income Taxes and Salary of Corrupt Witness Who Committed Perjury in Ecuador Case

Reposted from The Chevron Pit

Without public disclosure, Chevron has re-upped its contract to pay $144,000 annually to former Ecuadorian judge Alberto Guerra after he admitted perjuring himself in a federal court during the company's RICO trial. The perjury happened after Chevron lawyers at the outside law firm Gibson Dunn coached Guerra on his false testimony for 53 consecutive days.

We have no choice but to call this what it is: a witness bribery scheme orchestrated by a major American oil company. Chevron's aim is to evade paying for the clean-up of what could be the world's worst oil disaster, caused deliberately on its watch when it operated in Ecuador (under the Texaco brand) from 1964 to 1992.

The discredited Guerra – who has admitted that he accepted bribes when he was a judge in Ecuador – has become a central figure in Chevron's campaign to evade paying the $9.5 billion environmental judgment in the South American nation. Chevron was found to have deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the streams and rivers of the rainforest. The dumping continues to decimate indigenous groups and has caused an outbreak of cancer, according to the findings of three layers of courts in Chevron's preferred forum of Ecuador.

The Chevron payments to Guerra seem to have earned the company and its ethically-challenged lawyers at Gibson Dunn a fraud and bribery complaint to the U.S. Department of Justice. Amazon Watch, an environmental group that has been fighting to hold Chevron accountable, said it will lodge a formal complaint over the witness payments and falsification of evidence.

Paul Paz y Miño, a director at Amazon Watch, said:

It is unethical, illegal, and utterly shocking that Chevron continues to pay huge sums to a completely discredited witness who has admitted to repeatedly lying and accepting bribes to testify falsely in court. This arrangement is worth of a criminal investigation and we are asking the Department of Justice to look into it. We consider Chevron to have engaged in witness bribery.

Luis Yanza, a winner of the Goldman Environmental Prize and the longtime leader of the rainforest communities affected by Chevron's pollution, said in reference to Guerra:

Chevron and its lawyers gave a key witness cash out of a suitcase to falsify evidence to taint the Ecuador judgment so the company does not have to pay for the clean-up of oil pollution that is causing grave harm to thousands of people. This is just one example of the company's plan to threaten judges and sabotage the proceedings in Ecuador.

Guerra stunned the legal community after he admitted during a recent international arbitration proceeding that he lied on the stand during the company's retaliatory civil "racketeering" (or RICO) case targeting the lawyers for the villagers who won the historic judgment. Chevron made a mockery of justice in that case after the judge (Lewis A. Kaplan) displayed intense personal animus toward the villagers while hiding his investments in Chevron despite calls for his recusal over bias.

(As background, a federal appellate court in New York unanimously reversed Kaplan in 2011 when he earned the scorn of the international legal community by trying to block enforcement of the Ecuador judgment anywhere in the world. Without a jury or a fair trial, Kaplan then tried to overrule the final decision of Ecuador's Supreme Court by refusing to consider any evidence of Chevron's contamination and claiming the Ecuador decision was the product of racketeering. In the meantime, the villagers recently won a unanimous decision from Canada's Supreme Court authorizing them to seize Chevron assets to enforce their judgment. Here is a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron.)

Guerra also recanted key portions of his testimony in the RICO case claiming that the Ecuadorian trial judgment was ghostwritten by the plaintiffs, according to reports from Courthouse News and Vice. These developments emerged recently when transcripts from the arbitration finally were released after Chevron, in yet another violation of the ethical rules, tried to keep them under wraps for months.

The transcripts show Guerra admitting that Chevron extended his contract for another year. Guerra does no work for Chevron other than make himself available to testify on the Ecuador case – a fact that many observers believe violates federal law and the ethical rules, as this legal brief and this opinion from a prominent ethics expert explain.

Yet Chevron continues to make up its own rules. In 2012, company operatives Andres Rivero and Yohi Ackerman traveled to Ecuador and paid Guerra $38,000 in cash out of a suitcase for his "cooperation" with the company. That included a promise by Guerra to try to bribe the trial judge with a down payment of $1 million with the goal of getting him to recant his decision. "Money talks but gold screams," Guerra said to the Chevron operatives at the time.

Chevron then inked a two-year deal providing Guerra a $144,000 annual salary, full payment of all income taxes, payment for the fees of three personal lawyers, health care, a car, and immigration services. The immigration services have allowed several family members to become residents of the United States after some had been living here illegally for years.

We also believe that Guerra and his team lied to the Department of Homeland Security to legalize the status of himself and his family members. By not disclosing to the U.S. government the many crimes Guerra had committed in Ecuador and later in the United States, Guerra (and Chevron) arguably violated U.S. law and committed a felony. Our investigation of this aspect of the Chevron-Guerra subterfuge continues.

All told, we conservatively estimate Chevron's paid benefits to Guerra amount to at least $250,000 annually. The amount rises considerably when one takes into account benefits paid to Guerra's three adult children and their families. Not bad for a man who testified he had $146 in his bank account when he struck the deal with Chevron.

Even with these extraordinary payments, Guerra seems to have very little skill as a Chevron stooge. Like most liars, he gets twisted into knots during cross-examination. Eric Bloom, a lawyer for Ecuador's government, shredded Guerra on the witness stand during the arbitration proceeding. (See these transcripts for the evidence. For more background on Guerra's admissions as well as the larger implosion of Chevron's RICO case, see this press release.)

As said, Chevron lawyers Randy Mastro and Avi Weitzman (both at Gibson Dunn) coached Guerra for an interminable period of time before letting him testify. Guerra had been removed from the bench in Ecuador for misconduct and was facing criminal prosecution until Chevron spirited him out of the country. Mastro also personally negotiated Chevron's payments to Guerra as the same time he was preparing a sworn affidavit for Guerra that by Guerra's own admission contained multiple lies.

Guerra admitted in the arbitration that he lied when he told Judge Kaplan he had been offered a "bribe" from the plaintiffs to write the trial court judgment against Chevron. He also confessed that critically important shipping records had nothing to do with the Chevron case, contradicting his prior testimony. He confessed that there were no emails or documentary evidence that the trial court judgment had been drafted by the plaintiffs and then given to the judge on a flash drive, as he had told Judge Kaplan.

The entire saga might expose Mastro and Weitzman to criminal prosecution, according to respected environmental lawyer Marco Simons.

One of the main targets of Chevron's retaliation campaign, U.S. attorney Steven Donziger, has filed the latest evidence of Guerra's collapse before the federal appellate panel reviewing Judge Kaplan's flawed decision. Donziger also turned the tables on Chevron by demanding the company cease the destruction of all documents related to the dispute in anticipation of further litigation by the villagers over the company's worsening misconduct.

The more Chevron fights, the more the company and General Counsel Pate seem to lose ground. Chevron's jurisdictional shell game is getting more exposed. The larger question is when Chevron's top leaders will be held accountable for the destruction of the Amazon and their own gross misconduct in evading court orders to clean up the damage.

Businessweek's Paul Barrett Ignores Spectacular Implosion of Chevron's RICO Case

Reposted from The Chevron Pit

Businessweek reporter Paul Barrett is again taking Chevron's side in the Ecuador pollution litigation by failing to report on the spectacular implosion of the company's RICO case. Readers of Businessweek interested in the latest news on the litigation are getting shortchanged.

We previously reported how Barrett generally frames his stories about the Ecuador litigation in a way that apologizes for Chevron's corruption and betrays a deep animus toward U.S. attorney Steven Donziger, the advisor to the affected rainforest communities that obtained a $9.5 billion judgment against the oil giant. Barrett adopted his flawed narrative in his thinly-sourced book on the case (called Law of the Jungle), which is largely an ad hominem attack against Donziger and is replete with factual errors and made-up scenes.

This "notice of defamation" letter written by Donziger explains some of the details of Barrett's sloppy and unethical journalistic practices. Usually missing from Barrett's stories is that Ecuador's Supreme Court (in the country where Chevron insisted the trial be held) unanimously affirmed the liability against Chevron in a 222-page decision meticulously documenting extensive contamination at hundreds of former company well sites. (See this summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron and this affidavit documenting some of the company's corruption.)

Barrett is now refusing to report on explosive new evidence from a related arbitration proceeding that strongly suggests Chevron's retaliatory RICO case has imploded in spectacular fashion. Others are reporting this news fully, but not Barrett. (See this powerful analysis from Amazon Watch, this article from Vice, and this article from Courthouse News.)

Here are some recent developments that severely damage Chevron's litigation prospects but are ignored by Barrett:

• Chevron's main claim that the trial court judgment in Ecuador was "ghostwritten" by lawyers for the villagers has fallen apart. There was scant evidence of this other than the testimony from a corrupt and impoverished Ecuadorian witness (Alberto Guerra) paid $2 million by the oil company after having only $146 in his bank account; now Guerra admits under oath he lied on the stand during Chevron's RICO case about critical elements of his story.
  
• Barrett has completely underplayed evidence from a computer forensic examination requested by Chevron in the arbitration proceeding that found the Ecuador trial judge saved the Word file that became the judgment on his own computer more than 400 times. Guerra had claimed the judgment was given to the judge by the plaintiffs on a flash drive just before it was issued. This evidence has been presented to the appellate court that oversees Kaplan.
• Barrett also ignored that Guerra testified in Kaplan's RICO proceeding that the Ecuador trial judge promised him 20 percent of an alleged $500,000 bribe. In his arbitral testimony, Guerra confessed it was a total lie.
• Guerra claimed he played a key role in the so-called ghostwriting. But he admitted he lied before Kaplan by claiming he made two trips to Lago Agrio to work on the judgment; in fact, those trips had nothing to do with the Chevron case. Again, silence from Barrett.
  
• Guerra also conceded in his arbitral testimony that there is no evidence corroborating his allegations that the lawyers for the affected communities bribed the trial judge and wrote the judgment, which is Chevron's defense to actions to seize company assets to satisfy the Ecuador judgment. Guerra admitted he lied to Chevron to obtain more money from Chevron. "I lied there," he said. "I recognize it. I wasn't truthful." Again, nothing from Barrett.
  

In Canada, a trial to seize Chevron assets is proceeding. The villagers have filed a motion for summary judgment to knock out all of Chevron's defenses on the grounds they already were litigated and resolved by the court in Chevron's preferred forum of Ecuador. Barrett has yet to report on this development.

We suspect Barrett's recent retreat into silence has much to do with the fact developments are turning against Chevron. The company's trumped-up "fraud" narrative is the central thrust of Barrett's book and his prior reporting. To report that his main narrative is unraveling would further damage Barrett's credibility and would not be in his commercial interest.

Want to get a sense of what Businessweek's readers who rely on Barrett are missing? Read Eva Hershaw's account in Vice News in an article titled "Chevron's Star Witness Admits to Lying in the Amazon Pollution Case":

In testimony given before the international tribunal... Guerra has now admitted there is no evidence to corroborate allegations of a bribe or a ghostwritten judgment, and that large parts of his sworn testimony, used by Kaplan in the RICO case, were exaggerated and, in other cases, simply not true.

Adam Klasfeld of Courthouse News reported that Guerra "repudiated much of his explosive testimony" and admitted to lying about a number of key facts. Marco Simons, an attorney with Earth Rights International, suggested that two Chevron lawyers, Randy Mastro and Avi Weitzman, might face criminal exposure for coaching Guerra for 53 days to present false testimony. (For more on how Chevron law firm Gibson Dunn has falsified evidence, see here.)

Chevron had no real answer for several days to these devastating setbacks. That's where Barrett stepped in to post a short story on the company's website that is nothing more than a tortured attempt to rehabilite the lying Guerra.

Barrett might be technically correct to point out that Guerra has not recanted his testimony that a bribe occurred, but Guerra has admitted to being such a serial liar about everything else that nothing he claims can be taken seriously. That's especially true when there is no corroborating evidence left to back up the central feature of his story.

Predictably, Chevron spokesperson Morgan Crinklaw has been pushing Barrett's latest defense of Guerra into social media as a surrogate statement for the company. Barrett's colleague Roger Parloff of Fortune -- himself silent about the unraveling of Chevron's "racketeering" case -- tweeted it. (For more on Parloff's own bias in favor of Chevron, see this blog and this analysis.) And Barrett took the extraordinary step of contacting another reporter via Twitter to challenge her reporting contesting Chevron's narrative.

Businessweek needs to assign a truly independent journalist to report this story. In the meantime, Barrett should consider joining Crinklaw in Chevron's public relations department. He could make a lot more money doing the same thing.