Chevron Meeting to Highlight Companies Successes Turned into Forum on Abuses

Flickr image by Rainforest Action Network

Oil Giant Withers Under Criticism from Communities Suffering Human Rights and Environmental Harms

Today at Chevron's annual shareholder meeting, 22 indigenous, First Nation, and other impacted community members and supporters who had traveled to the company's headquarters from locations around the globe and across the state confronted CEO John Watson with the brutal human and environmental abuses caused by the oil giants operations.

Watson struggled to defend his company's record in the face of the devastating criticism from institutional investors, shareholders, and impacted community members and was instead forced to turn multiple times to pre-packed video and slideshows prepared prior to the meeting.

Outside the meeting, 150 supporters rallied in a colorful and creative protest against the company's operations around the world and across their home state.

Community leaders from Angola, Ecuador, Nigeria, Indonesia, the tarsands of Canada, Alaska, Texas, and Richmond, and those representing communities in China, Australia, the Philippines, Kazakhstan, and more attended the meeting as share- and proxy-holders providing first-hand descriptions of their lives and environment in and around Chevron's operations.

While Watson tried to highlight the company's human rights, environmental, and economic successes, when the microphones were opened to shareholders, those successes quickly turned to failures. Half the meeting became a referendum on the company's disastrous track record of supporting brutal dictators in Burma, decimating local livelihoods though its offshore operations in Alaska and Angola, and causing mass pollution and destruction of human health in locations as diverse as Ecuador, Richmond, California, Kazakhstan, Indonesia, and Nigeria.

Emem Okon of the Kebetkache Women Development and Resource Centre, who had come from Nigeria's Niger Delta, challenged Watson's assertions that the company had improved its record on flaring.

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