Regarding Chevron's supposed and much heralded "bribery scandal" videos in which it fingers Ecuadorian Judge Nuñez as a reason why it cannot get a fair trial in Ecuador, the San Francisco Chronicle reports:
The closest the conversation comes to the suggestion of bribery happens when Hansen at one point abruptly asks the judge, "Do you want part of, of my contract?" The judge responds, "I don't have anything to do with that." Then Hansen appears to correct himself, and says he's talking about money that would go to the government, not the judge. Borja and Hansen also ask him several times whether he will rule against Chevron, and he repeatedly tells them they must wait for the verdict to find out. These excerpts are from Chevron's transcript. Hansen: They've been the guilty party for more than many years, right? Nuñez: You'll see that, sir. What you want to find out is whether it's going to be guilty or not, I'm telling you that I can't tell you that, I'm a judge, and I have to tell you in the ruling, not right now...
But as Nuñez prepares to leave the meeting, Hansen asks him again. Hansen: Oh, no, I, I know clearly how it is, you say, Chevron is the guilty party. Nuñez: Yes, sir.---------
Nuñez later told the Associated Press:"Never, never, never have I said that it will go against" Chevron, the judge said. "They asked me if a sentence would come out. I said, 'Yes sir, a sentence will come out.' For or against? I have never said anything."The video is badly (deliberately?) translated by Chevron, and leads the viewer to suppose that Nuñez has said "Yes, Sir" in answer to the question about whether he would rule against Chevron. However, as Han Shan, a human rights campaigner for Amazon Watch says:
If you watch the video, Hansen's tortured Spanish statement about Chevron being el culpable - the guilty party- comes as people are shuffling papers and preparing to leave the room. It's not at all clear who the judge is answering or speaking affirmatively to. You can't see the judge when you hear his muffled "yes, sir" and one gets the sense that he's just trying to finish up this meeting that he apparently attended as a favor to an acquaintance.And that's Chevron's smoking gun -- the judge's single, hardly intelligible, and un-directed "yes, sir" at the end of a meeting at which he has repeatedly said that he cannot predict his verdict.
As the oil giant's PR flacks and executives worked up a sweat fanning the flames of its contrived controversy,The "bribery plot" Chevron trumpets in its press release has nothing to do with the judge or the court, and instead centers around a separate meeting at which the former Chevron contractor and American businessman discuss payments to a single, excitable man who claims to be connected to Ecuador's ruling party, for access to government contracts for remediation of Chevron's contamination.
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Again, we refer everyone to a memo entitled "Offer of Bribe to Auditors" issued by Texaco back in 1988, which shows how Chevron is hardly one to talk about corruption:
www.texacotoxico.org/eng/node/284
