QUITO, Ecuador (CN) - Remarkably unguarded at Ecuador's presidential palace, the top legal adviser to President Rafael Correa gave a point-by-point refutation of the New York decision blocking enforcement of his country's $9.5 billion litigation with Chevron.
For nearly 90 minutes from his office inside Colonial Quito's Carondelet, also known as the Palacio de Gobierno - or the government's palace - attorney Alexis Mera spoke freely, and indignantly, about the nearly 500-page ruling that U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan delivered in Manhattan last week.
Though Chevron faced a $9.5 billion verdict in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, for oil contamination, Kaplan said the judgment was "procured by corrupt means," through bribery and the collusion of the Ecuadorean government, and blocked its collection.
Named after Texaco's former headquarters in Sour Lake, Texas, the Lago Agrio court granted the award to a class of 30,000 indigenous and farmer plaintiffs in 2011.
Mera took particular offense at two sections of Kaplan's ruling devoted to Correa's "influence" over the Lago Agrio trial.
"There are certain things that he takes for granted from Chevron," Mera said. "He only takes for granted the things that Chevron tells him to write."
Though an unnamed media contact of the Lago Agrio plaintiffs said Correa offered to "call a judge," Mera brushed this off as a "third-person" email.
As if speaking directly to Kaplan, Mera asked, "How could you take that for granted?"
Chevron spokesman Morgan Crinklaw remarked that the republic is "long on accusations and short on evidence."
Kaplan wrote that Correa had replaced Ecuador's director of public prosecutions, or fiscal general, with an old college roommate to amp up pressure for a settlement by prosecuting former Texaco attorneys Rodrigo Perez Pallares and Ricardo Reis Veiga.
Mera insisted, however, that the general in question, Washington Pesántez, was never Correa's roommate.
The men did once attend the same university, but the alleged conspiracy does not add up because the prosecution of Pallares and Veiga was dropped before it ever went to court, Mera said.
"What was the point here?" he asked. "The point is not whether one prosecutor is friend or another prosecutor is enemy. The point was that Mr. Kaplan is sustaining is that we, Ecuador, as a republic, want to prosecute Chevron lawyers, and we want to [send] them to jail."
Chevron raised similar arguments in urging U.S. representatives to revoke Andean trade preferences.
"Two of Chevron's attorneys in Ecuador were in fact later criminally indicted and forced to leave the country for their safety," the oil giant wrote in a May 18, 2012, letter to the Office of U.S. Trade Representative.
Indeed, Chevron fingered Mera in the same supposed conspiracy, citing an outtake from "Crude," a Joseph Berlinger documentary on the lawsuit in Lago Agrio. The oil giant gained access to portions of the documentary that hit the cutting room floor during discovery for the New York trial.
Another outtake from "Crude" shows Mera asking to have the cameras turned off in a meeting with the Lago Agrio plaintiffs because taping his advice was "inappropriate."
Kaplan's ruling lumps such denials under party line by New York attorney Steven Donziger, the principal target of Chevron's fraud allegations. The ruling quotes several emails from Donziger urging officials to adopt this position when talking to the press.
