hRb7u

"The Ecuadorian court was and is well aware ofthe Ecuadorian Plaintiffs' ex parte contacts with
Cabrera and submission of materials to him-and indeed, invited such contacts and
submissions." Of course, if the court was aware of the RICO Defendants' collusion with
Cabrera, which was roundly denied by the RICO Defendants and Cabrera for years, that merely
implicates the court in the fraud. It does not excuse or justify it.
292. In depositions ordered by U.S. courts, the RICO Defendants have continued to
obstruct Chevron's investigation, and maintained untenable positions in the face of
overwhelming evidence. For example, Defendant Ann Maest, despite her appearance in the
Crude outtakes participating in a meeting with Cabrera at which the Cabrera Report was planned,
denied under oath that she had "any contact with Mr. Cabrera in conjunction with [her] work[.]"
When asked about the meeting, she simply asserted, "I don't recall that," ignoring the fact that,
as she would admit just a few minutes later, she had watched the video ofthe meeting within the
past two weeks. Then, when the video was shown to her, and she was asked about Fajardo's
statement that "the work isn't going to be the expert's," she testified that she "didn't know what
he meant," and she denied understanding that Chevron would be excluded from that work,
despite clearly being shown commenting and laughing about that very subject on the video, and
the fact that her own handwritten notes from the meeting contain the following phrase, marked
by a large star: "Only plaintiffs are doing Peritaje Global, not Chevron." Throughout her
deposition testimony, nearly every time she was shown evidence-often her own work
product-that Stratus had knowingly prepared the Cabrera Report and intended it to be
misperceived as independent, she claimed she did not remember, or did not understand, the
evidence. When confronted with Cabrera's repeated denials of assistance from the RICO
Defendants, Maest testified that she had discussed this with Beltman, and that their conclusion
was simply that "in Latin culture, for men it's not something that you want to admit, that you are
getting help[.]" Among the few things she would admit in her testimony was that the
conspirators understood that their meetings with Cabrera had to be kept secret.
116