The corporate watchdog group Public Eye on Monday refuted claims by Chevron that their award ceremony is a sham designed to hurt the reputations of companies they don’t like.
Last week, as part of its annual award ceremony in Switzerland, Public Eye named Chevron the most irresponsible company. The group cited an environmental incident in Northern Ecuador as a primary reason to go after the energy company. Paul Paz, from Amazon Watch, told crowds at the award ceremony that he was particularly outraged about the incident.
Not long after, Chevron shot back by arguing that Amazon Watch is only trying to hurt its reputation and that the Public Eye Awards for which it is affiliated are a sham and are not actually meant to promote corporate responsibility.
According to sources for The Daily Caller News Foundation, Amazon Watch has a direct connection to Steven Donziger, the man who accused Chevron in court of being responsible for the environmental incident in Ecuador.
After Chevron lost the case in Ecuador, they went to the U.S. courts to prove evidence provided in the previous trail was fraudulent. In March 2014, a U.S. federal court ruled that the $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador was the product of fraud and racketeering activity.
Judge Lewis Kaplan stated in the court’s ruling, “The wrongful actions of Donziger and his Ecuadorian legal team would be offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law, including Ecuador – and they knew it.”
In response to this, a spokesman for Public Eye told TheDCNF, “Amazon Watch has never been found to have ‘presented false evidence’ about Chevron’s actions in Ecuador.”
“When Amazon Watch defended itself against Chevron retaliatory RICO subpoena action, they soundly defeated Chevron in court,” the spokesman continued. “In fact, as Federal Court Judge Nathaniel Cousins ruled in 2013, Chevron could not provide any evidence of wrongdoing by Amazon Watch.”
“The decision by Judge Kaplan is under appeal and likely to be overturned in a matter of months,” the spokesman argued. “The victorious lawsuit in Ecuador has been affirmed unanimously by two separate appellate courts in Chevron’s chosen forum of Ecuador.”
“It is also in the process of being enforced in Canada, Argentina and Brazil,” the Public Eye spokesman concluded. “Chevron will be forced to pay the $9.5 billion it owes to the affected communities in Ecuador for its admitted dumping of 18 billion gallons of toxic waste when it operated in Ecuador under the Texaco brand.”
Chevron was quick to defend itself again against Public Eye.
“Steven Donziger and his associates were found by a U.S. court to have committed racketeering, extortion, money laundering, wire fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, witness tampering and obstruction of justice in obtaining the Ecuadorian judgment against Chevron,” a spokesperson for Chevron told TheDCNF.
“Donziger, his Ecuadorian legal team and other associates, fabricated environmental evidence, pressured scientific experts to falsify reports, plotted to intimidate judges into handing down favorable rulings, bribed court-appointed experts, ghostwrote court reports and even drafted the final judgment,” Chevron concluded. “We are confident that the judgment against them will be upheld.”
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