Chevron couldn’t have won a more emphatic victory in its long-running Ecuadorian pollution case than Monday’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals in NY.
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American lawyer Steven Donziger – who has worked the case for decades – moved the case to the U.S.in the hopes an American court would force Chevron to comply with the Ecuadorian judgment.
As for Donziger’s objection that US courts would violate “principles of worldwide comity” by second-guessing the Ecuadorian judiciary, Kearse noted that the appeals courts in the South American nation had expressly said that the corruption allegations should get sorted out by American judges.
Amazon Watch has a direct connection to Donziger, as its executive director, Atossa Soltani, admitted to hiring a liege of activists to intimidate judges in Northern Ecuador.
He said the ruling “leaves no doubt that the Ecuadorean judgment against Chevron is the illegitimate and unenforceable product of misconduct”.
A three-judge panel unanimously affirmed a trial court’s determination that, in 2011, the lead attorney for some 30,000 Ecuadorians had won a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron by means of bribery, coercion, and fraud. It noted, however, that Kaplan’s decision after trial doesn’t invalidate the Ecuadorian judgment and doesn’t stop the enforcement of the judgment anywhere outside the U.S.
A USA spokeswoman for the Ecuadoreans, Karen Hinton, said they were shocked and called it a “sad day for the US justice system”.
If those efforts succeed, it remains an open question whether the Ecuadorean plaintiffs can actually collect the money.
“There is no authority suggesting that a party ignorant of its attorney’s fraudulent actions may enforce a fraudulently procured judgment”, said the decision by Judge Amalya Kearse.
Deepak Gupta, Donziger’s appellate lawyer, countered: “Today’s decision is unprecedented in American law”.
“Never before has a US court allowed someone who lost a case in another country to come to the U.S.to attack a foreign court’s damages award”, Gupta said in an email.
The lawsuit, which has been raging for 23 years, began in NY and eventually shifted to Ecuador in 2003.
Chevron, which bought Texaco in 2001, hasn’t argued against the actual pollution of the rain forest.
Ecuador’s highest court in 2014 upheld the verdict but reduced the judgment to about $9.5 billion. Chevron has denied liability for the environmental damage and has not yet paid any of the judgment.
“These people believe that they are above states, above justice”, Correa said of Chevron. Those proceedings are still ongoing.
The ruling on Monday by the federal appeals court upheld the lower court’s ruling, which Kearse cited in writing the appellate court’s decision.
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“The broader investment community is signaling that at the end of the day, this will go away”, said Brian Youngberg, an energy analyst at Edward Jones. Previous developments, either for or against the company, have failed to move its share price, showing that investors don’t anticipate it having a material impact.
