Friday, August 28th 2009
“Ecuador’s current constitution, which was drafted by an assembly that included ample indigenous representation, was approved by popular vote in September 2008. It was a project of President Rafael Correa, a socialist allied with Venezuelan leader Hugo Chavez and whose País Party dominated the constitutional assembly that produced the document.”
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Friday, August 28th 2009
“President Rafael Correa said the government will repatriate in the short term $1.6 billion of liquid reserves invested abroad, raise the tax on capital outflows to 2% from 1%, establish a 12% value-added tax on imports of newsprint, raise taxes on cigarettes and alcohol, and establish a minimum income tax on companies’ Total sales. ”
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Friday, August 28th 2009
“Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa’s bid to stop capital from leaving the country will fail because investors doubt his spending plans are sustainable, said Jaime Carrera, head of the Fiscal Policy Observatory in Quito.”
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Friday, August 28th 2009
“President Rafael Correa presented the tax reform bill as a measure for coping with the international crisis. The initiative has four themes: balancing the external sector, channeling private savings toward investment, promoting social justice, and countering tax evasion.”
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Friday, August 28th 2009
“They look at individual cases of cancer and say it can not be traced back to the oil that was spilled by Chevron,” he said. “It’s true that the exact correlation cannot be proved.” – Pablo Fajardo, lead trial lawyer. The (Eugene, OR) Register-Guard: 8/27/09
In a statement made during an August 26, 2009 speech, Ecuadorian attorney Pablo Fajardo once again admitted that the activists and trial lawyers involved in the lawsuit against Chevron cannot prove the cancer claims they have made against Chevron.
A number of individuals representing the plaintiffs have made similar statements. In a May 12, 2009 interview with Radio CRE, CRE Noticias, Luis Yanza, Legal Coordinator of Amazon Defense Coalition said, “But I should clarify one thing: the cancer subject is relatively complementary because in the trial we don’t have to prove that anyone died of cancer…”
Similarly, in comments posted on the San Francisco Chronicle’s website, Karen Hinton, U.S.-based spokesperson for the Amazon Defense Coalition said, “The lawsuit does not seek to prove health claims because of the associated costs; it has been expensive enough to prove the contamination itself.”
Neither the plaintiffs’ attorneys nor the court appointee, Richard Cabrera, have submitted any medical evidence that a single cancer case or death has occurred. Cabrera submitted only a summary of opinion survey results from which he extrapolated approximately $9.5 billion for alleged cancer deaths. Not only is his alleged cancer death rate more than 250 times higher than that reported by the Ecuadorian government for this region of the Amazon, he fails to name a single patient or provide any death certificates or medical records.
In 2006, Cristobal Bonifaz, the attorney that originally filed the lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador sued Chevron in a U.S. federal court for the Northern District of California alleging his new clients developed cancer as a result of Texaco’s operations. In 2007, after some of the plaintiffs admitted that they had never been diagnosed with cancer, the presiding federal judge dismissed the case, fined Bonifaz $45,000, sanctioned the lawyers, and ordered them to submit the ruling to their state bars.
If the plaintiffs are trying to extort over $9 billion for claims they admit they cannot prove–what else are they fabricating?
Thursday, August 27th 2009
“Army General Raúl Castro Ruz, President of the Councils of State and the Council of Ministers of Cuba, and President of the Republic of Ecuador, Rafael Correa Delgado, had an extensive exchange of viewpoints on Tuesday as part of private visit to our country by the head of state of the sister South American nation.”
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Thursday, August 27th 2009
“The government also plans to introduce a minimum corporate tax to avoid evasion, said Correa, who was sworn in to a second term on Aug. 10. He has promised to “radicalize” his “citizens’ revolution” during the next four years in office.”
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Thursday, August 27th 2009
“Petroecuador, Ecuador’s state-owned oil company, increased the price of its Oriente crude oil by lowering its price differential by $0.47 a barrel beginning Aug. 1.”
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Thursday, August 27th 2009
“President Rafael Correa is set to announce a program to improve Ecuador’s balance of payments and to boost economic output and job creation.”
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Wednesday, August 26th 2009
“Two Chavez allies also joined the bandwagon: Evo Morales from Bolivia and Rafael Correa from Ecuador managed at the height of their power to amend the constitution and have re-election approved, although for an only mandate. Correa was re-elected on the new rules earlier this year and Morales faces a similar test next December, when he’s expected to win.”
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Wednesday, August 26th 2009
“Leftist President Rafael Correa wants foreign oil investors to surrender profit-sharing contracts to become service providers in exchange for fees and operators have held back investment in the OPEC nation while negotiations drag on.”
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Wednesday, August 26th 2009
“The Ecuadorian government expects to sign new service contracts next year with private oil companies operating in the country to replace several current transitory participation deals, Mines and Oil Minister Germanico Pinto said Tuesday.”
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Wednesday, August 26th 2009
“Thirteen people died from the A/H1N1flu in Ecuador last week, raising the country’s total death toll to 36, the Ecuadorian Public Health ministry said on Tuesday.”
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Wednesday, August 26th 2009
“The head of the Ecuadorian presidential security detail is in serious condition with swine flu, the Quito Military Hospital said. John Merino was infected with the AH1N1 flu virus and developed pneumonia, which worsened over the weekend, hospital spokesmen told Ecuavisa.”
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Tuesday, August 25th 2009
“Canada’s international trade minister met today with the vice-president of Ecuador to reaffirm trade relations.”
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Tuesday, August 25th 2009
“Ecuador remains hopeful that foreign investment in groundbreaking ‘carbon bonds’ will save a tract of its Amazonian rainforest and prevent millions of tonnes of fossil-fuel greenhouse emissions.”
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Tuesday, August 25th 2009
“On Sunday, Cuban state television broadcast the first footage of Castro since June 2008, showing him chatting with the Venezuelan graduates on Saturday. The Communist Youth newspaper Juventud Rebelde had a front-page photo of Fidel conversing with Ecuador’s president, Rafael Correa.”
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Tuesday, August 25th 2009
“Leftist President Rafael Correa, elected in 2007, now holds sway over the courts, Chevron asserts. Correa has publicly appeared with Donziger and Ecuadorian lawyers who represent plaintiffs suing Chevron and has expressed sympathy for residents claiming harm from oil waste.”
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Tuesday, August 25th 2009
“Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorim and his Ecuadorian counterpart Fander Falconi said on Monday that the Union of South American Nations (Unasur) Summit would be expanded.”
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Tuesday, August 25th 2009
“Stein, consul general of Ecuador for the past five years, now has office hours throughout Massachusetts. She will come to Lawrence once a month to get to know her compatriots living in the city and to help them with immigration issues, as well as obtaining visas, birth certificates, and other documents.”
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Thursday, June 24th 2010
Another post on Amazon Watch and the Chevron Ecuador case: While Amazon Watch and Steven Donziger yell and scream about American Chevron in an attempt to extort billions while claiming to represent Ecuador's "indigenous people," Ecuador President Rafael Correa is just one signed contract away from that country successfully nationalizing revenue from its oil industry. Read More »Thursday, June 24th 2010
This new blog post on the San Francisco Chronicle's website discusses Steven Donziger's role in the trial in Ecuador and the fabricated "independent court expert" report: In the never-ending Chevron Ecuador legal battle, Laywer Steven Donziger (the head of a decade-long battle to extort billions from Chevron for environmental damage caused by the Ecuador-owned Petroecuador and Ecuador President Rafael Correa's policy of allowing oil production in the Amazon, while having kicked out American oil companies) and the Amazon Watch organization yesterday called for additional damages against Chevron in Ecuador, citing alleged sabotage of the court proceedings by Chevron. Read More »Friday, June 11th 2010
Chevron Ecuador case is profiled: After years of litigation over its liability for environmental damage in the Amazon rain forest, the Chevron Corporation is going all-in in its fight with Ecuador by seeking to persuade a panel of international arbitrators that the country’s courts cannot be trusted to dispense justice for foreign investors. Last September, the US oil giant filed a claim for ‘denial of justice’ under a foreign investment protection treaty between the US and Ecuador. The claim is now a major part of the company’s damage-control strategy. Chevron has been readying itself for some time for a massive loss in the Ecuadorian courts, where plaintiffs are seeking to saddle the firm with a $30bn clean-up bill. Chevron insists that Ecuador’s state oil company, PetroEcuador, bears liability for any clean-up, adding that the country’s politically tainted courts are colluding with PetroEcuador and the country’s government to lay the blame at Chevron’s door. Read More »
Friday, July 30th 2010
Ecuador will begin in August the contract talks with foreign oil companies operating in the country: Ecuador will begin negotiating with oil majors in August new contracts to favor the state, Non-Renewable Resources Minister Wilson Pastor said on Thursday, setting the clock ticking for firms in the OPEC nation. Read More »Friday, July 30th 2010
Ecuador is planning to show new draft contracts to oil companies operating in the country: Ecuador's government plans to submit to private oil companies on Friday the model contract that will be used to exchange current production-sharing deals for service contracts. Negotiations with each company will start in the second week of August, the country's minister for non-renewable natural resources said Thursday. Read More »Friday, July 30th 2010
Ecuador will decide on a contract with a subsidiary of a U.S. based oil company: Ecuador will decide by November whether to continue the contract of Energy Development Corp., or EDC, a subsidiary of U.S.-based oil and gas producer Noble Energy Inc. (NBL), the country's minister for non-renewable natural resources told Dow Jones Newswires. Read More »