Environmental firm accused of assisting in egregious fraud gets federal contracts

Washington Times:

The environmental consulting firm accused by a judge of assisting “egregious fraud” by plaintiffs in the highly publicized lawsuit against Chevron Corp. successively received multimillion-dollar contracts from the U.S. government, including work on the infamous BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, according to federal records obtained by The Washington Times.

Stratus Consulting Inc., the Boulder, Colo.-based firm whose work was used by plaintiffs’ attorney Steven Donziger to persuade an Ecuadorean court to find Chevron liable for oil pollution, has not been excluded from receiving federally funded contracts because of its role in the case.

A federal judge in New York last month issued an order barring Mr. Donziger and the Ecuadorean villagers he represented from collecting in the United States on a $9 billion judgment by an Ecuadorean court against the oil giant, saying the verdict was the result of “egregious fraud.”

One part of the fraud, the court found, was that key parts of the “independent” expert analysis commissioned by the Ecuadorean court were written secretly by Stratus analysts hired by Mr. Donziger.

In April 2012, Stratus was awarded a $20 million contract by the Department of Commerce’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to conduct a natural resource damage assessment after the BP oil rig explosion that resulted in an estimated 4.9 million barrels of discharge into the Gulf of Mexico.

Even after revelations about the firm’s involvement in the Chevron case, the agency defended its contract with Stratus, saying it has full confidence in the firm’s integrity.
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This raises questions about the ability of the government to vet the work of contractors.  It also suggest that there is a tolerance for misleading when it comes to the environment.