Chevron: We Polluted? Sue the Victims!

[Shiranu]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/ ... 7620131014

(Reuters) - Chevron Corp will try to convince a U.S. judge this week that a group of Ecuadorean villagers and their U.S. lawyer used bribery to win an $18 billion judgment against Chevron from a court in Ecuador, in the latest chapter in a long-running fight over pollution in the Amazon jungle.

In a trial starting Tuesday, the oil company is asking a federal court in New York to prevent the villagers and their Harvard-educated lawyer, Steven Donziger, from using U.S. courts to enforce the Ecuadorean judgment.

A victory in the United States would likely help Chevron's defense in other countries where Donziger and the villagers may seek to enforce the judgment.

"We believe that any jurisdiction that observes the rule of law will find that the judgment is illegal and unenforceable because it's a product of fraud," said Morgan Crinklaw, a spokesman for Chevron.

Donziger and the villagers say they did nothing wrong in obtaining the judgment, and they accuse the judge in the U.S. case, District Judge Lewis Kaplan, of bias against them.

"These claims by Chevron are utterly baseless," said Chris Gowen, a spokesman for Donziger and the Ecuadoreans.

The trial is the latest chapter in a dispute over environmental contamination between 1964 and 1992 at an oil field in northeastern Ecuador operated by Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001.

Chevron says Texaco cleaned up its share of waste before turning the field over to state-owned Petroecuador. But in 2011, an Ecuadorean court awarded $18 billion to people from the village of Lago Agrio, which was affected by the pollution. The court subsequently increased the award to $19 billion to cover fees.

Donziger and the Ecuadoreans have been unable to collect the award in Ecuador because Chevron no longer has operations there.

In 2011, Chevron obtained an injunction from Judge Kaplan in New York blocking enforcement of the judgment anywhere outside Ecuador. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals later reversed that ruling.

Over nearly 30 years Texaco dumped billions and billions of toxic sludge into the environment of Ecuador, causing huge rates of cancer and environmental damage to the region. When they were bought by Chevron, they still had not paid the people back for damages done, so that cost was moved on to their new owners who then fled the country.

Ecuador says, "Hey, that's kinda fucked up" and finds Chevron's assets guilty of multiple crimes and put a $18 billion dollar fine on them for damages done, so Chevron sues the lawyer that represented the people of Ecuador after having  an American judge declare that Ecuador has no authority to fine Chevron.

Getting out of paying it... that's fucked up. But then to sue them for suing you when you were the ones who damaged the environment and harming both human and animal life in the region... come on.

[mykcob4]

Is there any thing worse than oil companies or the conservatives that apologize for them.

[SGOS]

Is there any thing worse than oil companies or the conservatives that apologize for them.

Many resource extraction industries are like that.  It's hard to say which ones are the worst.  They pass the cost of cleanup onto the public.  Flee the country or declare bankruptcy after they are done fucking things up.  Mining has a history of that.  My home town was polluted by WR Grace.  I don't know how many have died by asbestos poisoning from the mine.  No one knows.  Hundreds in my small town for sure.  More are sick and dying.  Wives of miners died from washing their husbands work clothes.  They fenced off the mine and refused to allow the EPA access.    Grace was sued but they won the case, of course.  Last I heard it is the most expensive EPA cleanup in history, which is still on-going after 15 years or more.  You are paying for it.  It's a disgrace.

[aileron]

I'm not exactly a fan of big oil, but courts in banana republics aren't exactly trustworthy either.  In doing just a bit of checking here, Chevron is absolutely justified in suing some very crooked lawyers.

Here's a link to a sworn deposition from an Ecuadorian judge who explains that he conspired with the presiding judge and the plaintiff's attorneys in the case.  He deposed that he and the presiding judge got huge bribes from the plaintiff's attorneys to craft the whole trial as the plaintiff's attorneys wanted it, down the the very wording of the judicial opinion in the decision.

[billhilly]

Yep, I was going to question the legalities myself on this.  Big oil is crooked but so are a lot of governments.

[Shiranu]

Sorry,  but they still committed the crime. If they want to appeal for a reduced fine,  I am full in support of them.  But just because the law was carried out improperly doesn't mean you can destroy the environment and poison thousands of people then walk away scott free.

And I am sure Cheveron has NEVER used their money to influence the law in their favour... if it's okay for the rich to do it to the poor,  then the poor have every right to do it to the rich.

[aileron]

Sorry,  but they still committed the crime.

A fraudulent trial doesn't make it clear how much of the crime is Chevron's and how much is Petroecuador's.  Petroecuador has one of the worst environmental records in the world, with 1000 oil spills in just five years.  

It's also worth noting that the environmental scientists the plaintiffs hired found no evidence of petrochemical migration from the former Texaco sites (so the lawyers changed the evidence to fix that slight problem with their case).  If they want to go after Chevron on the merits of the case, then great.  Show the real evidence and make Chevron pay damages and remediation fees accordingly.  As the BP and Exxon examples show, when faced with inescapable evidence big oil will pay up as a cost of business.  If Chevron gets off Scot free, the fraud of the plaintiff's attorneys will be the main reason why.

[Jason78]

If I worked for that company I'd be ashamed to pick up my paycheck.

[billhilly]

Holy shit!  According to CNN, it looks like the judge in the case was paid $500,000 to let the plaintiff's lawyers write the decision.  He wasn't able to answer any questions about his ruling and he's had 2 years to prepare for this testimony.  That if true, is some serious corruption.

Disastrous day for the Lago Agrio plaintiffs in Chevron trial

In remarkable testimony Tuesday in federal court in Manhattan, the former Ecuadorian judge who signed a $19 billion environmental judgment against Chevron in 2011 seemed startlingly unfamiliar with the contents of the opinion he claims to have authored. He was unable to account for key data, reasoning, case citations, and terms he used in it.
The strikingly poor performance of the judge, Nicolás Zambrano Lozada, appeared to bolster Chevron's contention that the $19 billion judgment in the environmental case, commenced in Lago Agrio, Ecuador in 2003, was not written by Zambrano at all, but rather by the plaintiffs lawyers themselves, who, Chevron maintains, won that opportunity by agreeing to pay Zambrano $500,000 from out of any eventual recovery. Zambrano maintains that he wrote the ruling without any assistance from anyone.
Zambrano's testimony came in a civil case Chevron (CVX) filed in Manhattan in February 2011 against U.S. lawyer Steven Donziger and other leaders of the Ecuadorian litigation. In that suit, brought under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), Chevron accuses the Lago Agrio plaintiffs team of having won the huge Ecuadorian judgment through bribery, extortion, fraud, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and money laundering.

http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2 ... ron-trial/

[Shiranu]

That's unfortunate, then.