MANHATTAN (CN) - Beneath the redactions of a legal brief before a tribunal in the Netherlands, lawyers for the Ecuadorean government unveiled a new piece of evidence to support their citizens' embattled $9.8 billion environmental judgment against Chevron.
Provided exclusively to Courthouse News, the leaked text describes a still-secret forensic report analyzing the computer hard drives of Ecuadorean Judge Nicolas Zambrano, who issued a verdict in Lago Agrio finding Chevron liable for oil devastation to the Amazon jungle.
It has been nearly a year since New York's U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found that the judgment had been "procured by corrupt means."
Kaplan had based his finding largely on allegations by Zambrano's predecessor Alberto Guerra, the first Ecuadorean judge to hear the Chevron case.
Now a key Chevron witness, Guerra testified that the Ecuadorean's lead attorney Steven Donziger and his colleagues promised him a $500,000 cut of the potential award to ghostwrite the judgment for Zambrano.
The Ecuadoreans have long attacked Guerra, who has a contract with Chevron for various perks, including at least $326,000, an immigration attorney and a car, as a "paid-for" participant in the oil giant's self-styled witness-protection program.
While noting that "Guerra's credibility is not impeccable," Kaplan wrote that his account was "corroborated extensively by independent evidence."
The evidence hunt meanwhile labors on before an arbitration tribunal in The Hague that is considering Chevron's claims against the Ecuadorean government for allegedly supporting the fraud against it.
The Latin American nation's Nov. 7, 2014, legal brief shows that the tribunal granted Chevron permission to search two of Zambrano's judicial computers, over Ecuador's "vociferous objection."
"It was a huge gamble and it did not pay off for [Chevron]," an unredacted version of that brief continues. "The hard drives prove what [Ecuador] has insisted all along: Judge Zambrano wrote the Lago Agrio judgment, and nothing Guerra says can be believed."
The brief contrasts Guerra's testimony with the summarized findings of Christopher Racich, the founder of the Vienna, Va.-based forensic consultant Vestigant, whose website boasts a clientele of "Fortune 500 companies, law firms, individuals and government agencies."
"It is hard evidence, not self-serving testimony, that carries the most weight," the brief states.
Guerra told the New York court that he cribbed and then edited a draft of the final judgment by attorney Pablo Fajardo, who argued the case in Ecuador for residents of Lago Agrio, where Chevron's predecessor Texaco drilled between 1972 and 1992.
"But there is absolutely no forensic evidence in respect to either Mr. Guerra's or Judge Zambrano's hard drives that offers any hint that Mr. Guerra actually drafted or edited even a single sentence of any of these orders," the unredacted brief states. "Nothing."
While Guerra testified that he transferred the ghostwritten judgment onto Zambrano's computer through a flash drive, Racich found no metadata indicating that any Ecuadorean court document entered either of Zambrano's hard drives through a USB port, the brief says.
Racich found that the file was created when Zambrano resumed jurisdiction over the case in October 2010, according to the brief.