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177. The first level of endorsement the RICO Defendants and their co-conspirators
put into play was the promotion of the Cabrera Report and the trumpeting of its "independence"
by Stratus, the report's secret author. On December 1,2008, Stratus released a fifteen-page
document purporting to analyze and defend the Cabrera Report. In this document, which bears
on its front page the signatures of Beltman and Maest, as well as other Stratus employees, Stratus
claimed, "Mr. Cabrera is thus acting in the capacity of a neutral 'expert' to the Court, and his
role is to assist the Court in evaluating the scientific and technical information that was collected
and compiled for the case. In the U.S. Court system, Mr. Cabrera would be called a Technical
Special Master."
178. Stratus's December 2008 review of the Cabrera Report is written to give the
impression that its authors had no connection to the Cabrera Report or the supplement to his
report, and were providing a neutral, third-party review. For example, the RICO Defendants and
their co-conspirators described the writing ofthe report as follows: "After reviewing the
extensive record of environmental data and information that was collected during the trial, and
collecting some of his own data, Mr. Cabrera has concluded that Texpet's operations severely
contaminated a large area of the Ecuadorian Amazon, and that the contamination has caused
extensive damages to the environment and its inhabitants." Once completed, Stratus's "review"
ofthe Cabrera Report was knowingly distributed by the conspirators using physical and
electronic mail and remains available on a co-conspirator's website at http://amazonwatch.org.
Yet Maest, who signed the review, has admitted that she did not know if Cabrera or any
disclosed member of his team actually wrote any portion of the report, and that she has never
seen anything suggesting that Cabrera actually considered or even read the report she and her
colleagues wrote for him.
179. Stratus's "review" was intended to deceive, as one of the lawyers retained by the
RICO Defendants who reviewed the submission in 20 I 0 recognized. Responding to an ongoing
discussion about the RICO Defendants' plan to accuse Chevron of fraud on the theory that it
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