Dr. Ann Maest, a managing scientist at Straus Consulting and aide to Steve Donziger, lead plaintiff’s lawyer in the Chevron Ecuador case, is the focus of the most recent attempt to spin the fraudulent lawsuit against Chevron in Ecuador in a way that would gain millions for the plaintiffs lawyers and associates – and Dr. Ann Maest is apparently one of them.
Today, EcoWatch.org uses Maest to make claims that Chevron was “lying in its long-running effort to discredit the lawsuit,” but all one has to do is go to Google and search “Dr. Ann Maest fraud” to come up with the truth: it appears that Dr. Maest herself has been paid to lie about pollution data from oil wells once used by Chevron up to 1992, when they left Ecuador, and Ecuador’s state-run oil company Petroecuador took over.
EcoWatch asserts this: “Chevron claimed that that Dr. Ann Maest, a prominent U.S. scientist who worked as an expert for the rainforest communities, testified under oath “that she was not aware of any scientific data indicating that drinking water wells have been impacted in any way by Texpet’s operations” in Ecuador…But then EcoWatch adds this as if to prove Chevron’s not telling the truth: “In her deposition, Maest repeatedly cites multiple and widespread instances of groundwater pollution at every single waste pit in Ecuador where such testing took place. Yet Chevron claims in its blog that “even the plaintiffs own scientists” agree with Chevron’s fabricated theory that there is no groundwater contamination in Ecuador.”
But this is what I found under “Dr. Ann Maest fraud:” a stinging rebuke of Dr. Maest by another blog called Wizbang, and that was repeated at another environmental blog called ResourcefulEarthNews.com.
Wizbang says that Ann Maest was “caught on tape agreeing to ignore her data on groundwater contamination and make a more damning, unsubstantiated assertion.” That “assertion” was the one EcoWatch points to in today’s EcoWatch blog post where it points to Maest saying that “There has been some sampling of groundwater that’s down gradient of pits, and they did find quite high concentrations of TPH [Total Petroleum Hydrocarbons] in groundwater.” and “The plaintiffs found “elevated concentrations of total petroleum hydrocarbons and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons…downstream of one of the separation stations in the concession.”
But what EcoWatch ether doesn’t know, or refuses to add for fear of damaging its own blog post, is that Dr. Ann Maest was caught on video saying there that no groundwater pollution has spread beyond the pitts and stations that were the center of oil field production, and were taken over by Petroecuador. Here’s the video where she says this, and then Steve Donziger basically says that he wants them to lie, saying “This is Ecuador. Okay. You can say whatever you want, and at the end of the day there will be a thousand people around the courthouse, you’re going to get what you want.”
And in the video below, Maest, Donziger, and Richard Lang talk about how they can claim a 30 billion to 50 billion damage claim. In other words, they’re trying to create a case of fake evidence to reach a monetary damage target they have already agreed to – and it looks like they planned to finish the talk on how to do that over sushi and fun in “The Old City.” Nice. Here’s the video:
But that’s just the start of it. Dr. Maest’s new claims were trashed by other scientists, then it was found she had a major connection to Kathy Kennedy in that Maest, like Kennedy, was making up stories about so-called environmental damage caused by Chevron in Ecuador. But the New York Post famously learned that Kennedy was to receive upwards of $40 million from a judgement against Chevron by an Ecuador court if that amount was at $18 billion, and of course legally recoverable – it’s not.
Thus, since Maest was found to have been asked to lie in her deposition, why should we not believe she too was in line for a big payday.
Sure looks that way.
Stay tuned.