Chevron’s Trial to Avert Ecuador Liability Takes John le Carre Turn

Zambrano quickly denied having ever met or spoken to Donziger, let alone having taken bribes from him. "No one has paid me, nor would I accept that," he said when asked if he was paid for his testimony.

Guerra, on the other hand, freely admits to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in cash from Chevron in a suitcase and entering a contract for at least $326,000 total on top of the services of an immigration lawyer, plus a car and other perks. Chevron defended these payments as transparent and necessary to guarantee the safety of Guerra and his family to protect them from retribution in Ecuador. The company says that Guerra's physical evidence corroborates his tale.

On Wednesday, Zambrano supplied an explanation for how that evidence wound up in Chevron's hands: that he allowed his trusted friend Guerra to use his office and computer when he was not there.

During opening argument, lawyers for the Ecuadoreans asserted that Chevron's case relies largely on the credibility of these two judges, and both parties took turns sullying and cleaning up Zambrano's reputation. Mastro noted that the Plenary Judicial Council disciplined Zambrano and another judge for freeing an alleged drug trafficker believed to be linked to the FARC, a Columbian guerrilla group.

Meanwhile, Zambrano may have an indirect financial stake in his testimony through his current job at Refineria Del Pacifico - a firm in which Ecuador's state-run oil company Petroecuador invests. Chevron blames that company for much of the oil pollution attributed to Texaco.

Julio Gomez, a New Jersey-based lawyer for two of the indigenous Ecuadoreans, asked questions painting Zambrano as the protagonist of a Horatio Alger story, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. The first lawyer in his family, Zambrano obtained a legal doctorate after serving in the Ecuadorean Air Force, working as a prosecutor before assuming the bench. Zambrano said that he brought charges against the cousin of an Ecuadorean president in a particularly "delicate" case.

Public attention to his work intensified between October 2011 and February 2012 when he served as the final judge in the case against Chevron. Zambrano said that the prior judge had closed the evidence-collection phase of the case, known in Ecuadorean procedure as an autos pera sentencia.

By his own admission, Zambrano lied to journalists about the case early in his tenure when he announced that he had 500 cuerpos - the term for a 100-page file - before he started on a verdict. He said that he already had been writing the decision by that time, but he insisted that only wanted the reporters to stop "harassing" him.

Chevron scoffed at the idea that he could have reviewed the 236,000-page case file and written the 188-page, single-spaced decision in that four-month time span. The Ecuadoreans suggested that it had been filled with repetitious and resolved Chevron motions.

Zambrano claimed to have noticed that he was being followed shortly after the ruling, but he was not allowed to detail those allegations on the witness stand because they were deemed irrelevant. Hints of the subject nevertheless found its way into the record through the transcript of Rivero and Guerra's phone chat.

Early in the chat, Rivero remarks, "Alberto Guerra has mentioned my name to you. And has given you my business card and also some articles about me."

Zambrano claims that this handoff occurred at an Ecuadorean airport in August 2012, about a year and a half after the ruling. He also asserted that Guerra told him that Chevron could make him a millionaire.

In the transcript, Rivero appears curiously knowledgeable about Zambrano's whereabouts.

"I am precisely in Manta," Rivero said, according to the transcript. "I could be at your home, I know you are not alone at home, but I could be at your home in 5 minutes. Or, at the hotel you may wish, or the exclusive restaurant, as you wish. But the truth is that it is important... You need to talk to me."

When Zambrano replies that he wants to check to see if "Dr. Guerra has told you anything," Rivera responds, "Doctor, next week there will be major news in the case. Everyone in this case will be protecting themselves next week."

Later that month, Chevron announced that Guerra signed up as a witness.

Zambrano continues to insist that he is being followed both in Ecuador and New York.

Advocates for the Ecuadoreans protest that they should be able to raise the issue to argue that Chevron has "unclean hands" in its lawsuit.

But U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is hearing the case without a jury, said the alleged espionage never has been traced to Chevron, and that the law would not recognize such a connection as relevant to the case even if it were proven.

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