I find it hard to take you seriously, especially when the IP address ( 190.154.65.27 ) attached to your comment leads to Quito, Ecuador. I’m guessing you’re a paid shill for the Amazon Defense Coalition. How much of the anticipated $27 billion judgment will you receive? Inquiring minds want to know!

Ricardo Reis Veiga, a Chevron vice president, and Rodrigo Perez Pallares, who has represented Chevron in Ecuador for more than 30 years, were indicted in September along with seven former Ecuadorian government officials for allegedly conspiring to falsify the results of a mid-1990s environmental clean-up that Chevron had hoped would secure its release from liability for up to $27.3 billion in damages for the largest environmental oil disaster in the world.

And just last week, Chevron may have nailed the final nail in the coffin of its own lawyers. A count-appointed scientific expert – indeed, he was paid by Chevron for his work – submitted the final batch of lab results for the case, which proved that no meaningful remediation had in fact taken place at two oil well sites that Reis Veiga and Perez Pallares had maintained had been cleaned up by Chevron more than 10 years ago.

Both sites, Auca 17 and Auca 19, contain Total Petroleum Hydrocarbon (TPH) levels in soil and water several times higher than the maximum allowed by Ecuadorian law, according to Dr. Marcelo Munoz, the count-appointed expert and a respected Ecuadorian scientist.

It’s worth noting again that the same indicted Mr. Perez Pallares – Chevron’s top lawyer in Ecuador for more than three decades – signed checks to Dr. Munoz for more than $20,000 for his work gathering evidence for this final field report. The readers of this blog deserve to have the facts checked. The truth is, both sides in the case, as ordered by the court, write checks to the court-appointed experts to pay all expenses associated with the collection of evidence necessary to ensure a fair, unbiased trial.