Legal News

Misspelling Leads to Big Discovery in Chevron/Ecuador Case

By Ashby Jones

Note to expert witnesses: If someone else is going to file allegedly fraudulent reports in a lawsuit in your name, for heaven’s sake, make sure they spell your name right.

It might sound like common sense. But the misspelling of an expert’s name in a multibillion-dollar environmental lawsuit filed against Chevron is what tipped off Chevron’s lawyers to the fact that the reports may have been fudged, a fact that has now been conceded by the expert himself. Click here for the WSJ story, by Ben Casselman and Angel Gonzalez. Click here, here and here for earlier LB posts on the Chevron case.

The disclosure comes in the midst of a huge lawsuit accusing Chevron of causing widespread environmental damage in the Ecuadorean rain forest. In 2004, the plaintiffs hired an American biologist named Charles Calmbacher to help oversee soil and water tests in Ecuador.

Reports signed by Calmbacher showed high levels of toxins at two sites and estimated the contamination would cost more than $40 million to clean up at these sites alone.

But in a sworn deposition last week, Calmbacher said he didn’t write the reports submitted over his signature, which said the sites were highly polluted and needed remediation.

“I concluded that I did not see significant contamination that posed immediate threat to the environment or to humans or wildlife around it,” Calmbacher said, according to a transcript provided by Chevron.

Steven Donziger, a New York-based attorney for the plaintiffs said Calmbacher’s reports were only a small part of the overall case, and that other tests have shown contamination at dozens of sites. (Click here for a story about Donziger and the case published last September, from the American Lawyer.)

Chevron has said it expects to lose the case in Ecuador but plans to challenge enforcement of any ruling in the U.S., where it is the second-largest oil company by revenue.

Now, back to the allegedly forged signature. Gibson Dunn’s Andrea Neuman, the Chevron lawyer who conducted the deposition, said Chevron became suspicious after Calmbacher apparently misspelled his own name in letters to the Ecuadorean court asking for an extension in filing his reports.

In his deposition, Calmbacher said he had flown back to the U.S. early due to illness, and had therefore sent pre-signed pages back to Ecuador with the understanding his findings would be printed over his signature. But he said the reports that were filed didn’t reflect his conclusions.

He said he never saw the final version of the reports that were submitted to the court until he was shown them during the deposition.

“I did not reach these conclusions and I did not write this report,” he said in the deposition.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 05, 2010 (boomark / email).