American Court authorizes that Ecuador used confidential information from Chevron
The State’s Attorney-General said yesterday in a statement that the Appeals Court of the tenth circuit in Denver (Colorado, United States) gave the authorization to the Ecuadorian Government to make use of the documentation that the US oil company Chevron kept in reserve as part of the International Arbitration carried out in the Court in the Hague.
This documentation is in the hands of the environmental expert of Chevron, Bjorn Bjorkman, and according to the Attorney General, “it could show that the company tried to minimize and hide the contamination caused by its operation for more than 30 years in Ecuador and that gave way to the lawsuit known as Lago Agrio”.
In the statement, the Attorney General pointed out that the Court of appeals for the tenth circuit in Denver considered the information that the oil company had and was protected by the doctrine of protection of the work of the lawyer, could not be reserved.
On the other hand, the National Court of Justice (NCJ) decided that it will archive and declare as ‘malicious’ the complaint that Thomas F. Cuellen, one of the lawyers for Chevron, filed against Judge Juan Nuñez, managing the lawsuit filed by the Amazonian communities against oil pollution.
Nuñez was recorded clandestinely while he was making comments on the case, and according to the American oil company he said in the recordings that the company was going to lose the trial, that the Ecuadorian Government would have provided lawyers to help to assemble the opinion against them and Alexis Mera, legal Secretary of the Presidency, would have given instructions about how to channel money from the sentence.
Therefore, Nuñez was removed from his post and later reinstated in his functions.