MANHATTAN (CN) - A forensic report that the republic of Ecuador commissioned to defend a more than $9 billion judgment against Chevron was once so confidential that a tribunal in the Netherlands had previously forbidden lawyers from even describing it.
Submitted to the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the document describes the data found inside the computers of Ecuadorean Judge Nicolas Zambrano, whose name appears on the judgment finding Chevron liable for oil devastation to the rainforest city of Lago Agrio in the Amazon.
Believing Zambrano merely signed his name to a ghostwritten verdict, Chevron asked a three-member tribunal to have Ecuador turn over the judge's hard drives for forensic analysis. Ecuador urged the tribunal to keep the information under wraps to protect the sovereignty of its judiciary and an ongoing criminal investigation.
Ironically, Ecuador's lawyers now contend that the forensic analysis of the drives contain the key to their vindication. A source said to work for Ecuador's attorney general seemed eager to have a third party leak the findings of Christopher Racich, a forensic analyst who founded the U.S.-based firm Vestigant.
The identity of the original source has never been verified, and tensions remain high regarding the shroud over proceedings.
On Feb. 27, Courthouse News exclusively reported that Racich said he found a running draft of the judgment in Zambrano's computers. The Permanent Court of Arbitration allowed Chevron to disseminate the findings of its expert, Spencer Lynch from the firm Stroz Friedberg, in response to the unauthorized disclosure, but it yielded to Ecuador's request that the underlying reports themselves remain sealed.
This development revealed that Chevron and Ecuador's experts disputed only the interpretation - but not any of the "forensic information" - of the data found in Zambrano's computers.
Now a source requesting anonymity has provided the first public glimpse of one of the forensic expert's unmediated findings, a still-confidential report by Racich from Nov. 7, 2014.
Early in the summary of his report, Racich aims for the crux of Chevron's ghostwriting allegations.
"There is ... no evidence - either presented by Mr. Lynch or uncovered during Vestigant's independent analysis - that any document was copied from a USB device to either the new computer or the old computer and used to create any part of the Lago Agrio judgment between October 2010 and February 2011," Racich wrote, referring to the dates of Zambrano's tenure. "Nor has Mr. Lynch presented any evidence (and I have found none) suggesting that any part of the Lago Agrio judgment was received by email or by any other means."
The Nov. 7 forensic report provides new details about the file that Racich believes became the Lago Agrio judgment.
"The forensic evidence demonstrates that a document on Judge Zambrano's computer that eventually became the Lago Agrio judgment (named Providencias.docx) was created on October 11, 2010, and was saved on Mr. Zambrano's computers at least 439 times between then and March 4, 2011 (i.e., an average of multiple saves per day)," the report states (parentheses in original). "Over that time period, the Providencias document contained increasing amounts of judgment text. And there is no evidence to suggest any version of that document was provided to Mr. Zambrano by a third party."