Michael Erman, Reuters 14 Apr 08;
NEW YORK (Reuters) - Chevron Corp on Monday criticized the award of a prestigious environmental prize to two leaders of a prolonged legal challenge that claims the oil company polluted the Amazon.
Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza will receive one of six Goldman Environmental Prizes, often characterized as the Nobel Prize for the environment, which will be handed out on Monday night in San Francisco.
Fajardo and Yanza led the charge against Texaco, which was bought by Chevron in 2001. They sued the company in Ecuador on behalf of peasants and Indians there, claiming the company polluted the jungle and damaged the health of residents by dumping 18 billion gallons of contaminated water there between 1972 and 1992.
Earlier this month, an independent environmental expert told the court in a non-binding report that Chevron should pay between $7 billion and $16 billion for environmental damage.
Chevron argues it was released from any liability when it paid $40 million for an environmental cleanup in the 1990s and blames state oil company Petroecuador for much of the pollution. The company has characterized the lawsuit as being politically-motivated and called it extortion.
It said the organizers of the Goldman Prize have been misled about Fajardo's and Yanza's environmental credentials.
"They have given an award to two people who are far from deserving," said Chevron spokesman Kent Robertson. "These individuals have stood in the way of Petroecuador's long overdue remediation. The only thing green they are interested in is money."
But the prize's founder, Richard Goldman, said the awards are thoroughly researched and fact-checked and that the group was proud to add the activists to its list of recipients.
"Pablo Fajardo and Luis Yanza are two ordinary Ecuadorians addressing a problem that impacts 30,000 of their countrymen: petrochemical waste spoiling hundreds of square miles of Amazon rainforest," Goldman said in a statement.
"Their work is motivated by a single desire: to ensure that their corner of the Amazon -- one of the world's most contaminated industrial sites -- is cleaned up."
Steven Donziger, a U.S. lawyer who advises Fajardo and Yanza on the case, said that Chevron's reaction to the award is an attempt to obscure a possible judgment against the company.
"Chevron has launched a misinformation campaign to hide the seriousness of this potential liability from its shareholders," Donziger said. "Part of that campaign is to dishonor the leaders of the lawsuit who are being internationally recognized for their courageous struggle."
(Reporting by Michael Erman; editing by Carol Bishopric)
Chevron denies 16.5-billion-dollar pollution damage in Ecuador
Yahoo News 15 Apr 08;
US oil giant Chevron on Monday rejected a court report holding it liable for 16.5 billion dollars in alleged environmental damage in Ecuador between 1964-1990, saying it owes the Ecuadoran government exactly "nothing."
"What we'll do is challenge it point by point ... and insist that the report is absurd and illegal," Chevron's Ecuador representative Rodrigo Perez told reporters after the government-commissioned report became known.
Quito has sued Chevron for widespread contamination its Texaco subsidiary's oil drilling operations allegedly caused in Amazon territories in the 26 years before it was sold to Ecuador's state-run oil company Petroecuador.
Several indigenous communities also filed a class-action lawsuit against Chevron in 2003, seeking compensation for soil pollution in their Amazon homelands.
A New York court in 1990 ordered Texaco to stand trial in Ecuador on environmental charges, the first time a US oil company was told to answer to charges in a foreign country.
However, Perez said his company "owes nothing for many reasons," including a 1995-1998 cleanup it did in the territories it had previously exploited that was approved by the Ecuadoran government.
"Any pollution you find now cannot reasonably have been caused by Texaco," he added.
Chevron, Perez said, "owes not a single penny" in Ecuador and "is not willing to give in," calling the Supreme Court-commissioned report "illegal and unfair."
The Quito-based Amazon Defense Coalition said Chevron had nobody to blame but itself for the legal mess it is in, since most of the evidence compiled in the official report came from the company's own field reports in the areas it exploited.
Even though Chevron analyzed soil samples from areas where it thought there was no contamination, the coalition said in a statement, "the lab results ... produced devastating numbers" of heavy metal contamination 200-630 times the US norms.
The expert report prepared by 15 scientists supervised by Ecuador's environmental department, the coalition added, "concluded ... that approximately 428 excess deaths from cancer could be attributed to the contamination left by oil field operations."
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