Sludge Match: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle With Ecuadorean Villagers
Sludge Match: Inside Chevron's $9 Billion Legal Battle With Ecuadorean Villagers
For more than two decades, energy giant Chevron and Ecuadorean activists, led by American lawyer Steven Donziger, have been embroiled in a contentious lawsuit about who is responsible for contaminating a vast swath of the Amazon
By Alexander Zaitchik | August 28, 2014
On March 4th, a federal judge in New York City blocked one of the richest and most scrutinized judgments in the annals of class-action law from being enforced on U.S. soil. The announcement of that decision, a closely watched event in legal and environmental circles, further muddied the future of $9.5 billion in damages the Ecuadorean Supreme Court in 2012 ordered the oil giant Chevron to pay for the systematic contamination of a patch of Amazon rainforest the size of Rhode Island. In his decision capping a seven-week trial, Judge Lewis Kaplan declared the Ecuadorean judgment null and void. The ten-figure fine, he concluded, was the fruit of a jungle shakedown — the result of a "five-year effort to extort and defraud Chevron."
The oil company cheered Kaplan's decision as "a resounding victory for and our stockholders." Steven Donziger, the warhorse lawyer for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs, decried the judge as an accomplice in "the biggest corporate retaliation campaign in history."
The New York trial marked more than a possible turning point in the no-holds-barred battle-royale pitting Chevron against homesteading farmers and a union of five Amazonian tribes. It was also a surprise homecoming. More than a decade ago, the same court ruled to move the case out of New York, where the plaintiffs thought it belonged, and down to Ecuador, where Chevron had cozy relations with key officials in government. The subsequent seesaw between sovereign legal systems is uncommon. So too Chevron's decision to counterattack the Ecuadorean decision using the RICO Act, a collection of racketeering laws usually employed in the prosecution of meth-dealing biker gangs and famous Italian crime families. Which isn't to say Chevron's RICO suit lacked Sicilian-accented echoes with mob cases. The oil company's sole witness to its central charge of bribery was a corrupt Ecuadorean ex-judge named Alberto Guerra, whose entire family has been naturalized and relocated on Chevron's dime. The entire case turned on the testimony of a witness living under a corporate protection plan. (Chevron has stated that the company has taken "reasonable measures, based on third-party assessments, to protect Guerra's safety and security."
The RICO decision put another wrinkle in a case defined by unprecedented international sprawl. What began around the time of Bill Clinton's first inauguration as a class-action suit filed in a New York court has ramified into an overlapping thicket of legal systems and mutual corruption allegations playing out from Buenos Aires to Gibraltar, from Washington D.C. to the Hague. So far, half a dozen legal authorities have been called on to adjudicate the main-event suit and its related cases. Law professors call it a "challenging paradigmatic interface," but it's best described as an extraordinary jurisdictional clusterfuck.
"This drama is in unchartered territory," says Josh Galperin of Yale's Center for Environmental Law and Policy. "We don't have much to compare it to." Marco Simons, legal director of EarthRights International, notes a disorienting, mildly hallucinogenic aspect. "We could be looking at an Alice in Wonderland scenario of never-ending litigation," he says. "It's hard to see where this ends."
More:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/sludge-match-chevron-legal-battle-ecuador-steven-donziger-20140828#ixzz3Blzvze9s
= new reply since forum marked as read
