District Judge Rules That Chevron Was, In Fact, the Victim of a $16 Billion Fraud Scheme Directed By US Attorneys

This has been going on for years.

Chevron, which some years back was presented with a multi-billion-dollar judgment related to pollution claims in Ecuador, has been engaged in a years-long battle against a coalition of lawyers, environmental groups, and activists, and its defense has been an interesting one: Not only has Chevron rejected the specific claims against it, it has maintained that the case is the result of a criminal conspiracy involving those same lawyers and environmentalists, corrupt judges, bribery, and more. The company’s general counsel, Hewitt Pate, said today: “The case against Chevron was the result of fraud, bribery, and other crimes, and its aim was extortion.”

The story might have struck many as too implausible even for a B movie, but a U.S. district court today issued a remarkable opinion confirming that the judgment against Chevron is indeed the result of fraud.

The ruling is long -- over 500 pages long. However, you can get the general sense of it from the first five pages (the first five numbered pages, after the very lengthy table of contents).

Upon consideration of all of the evidence, including the credibility of the witnesses– though several of the most important declined to testify – the Court finds that Donziger began his involvement in this controversy with a desire to improve conditions in the area in which his Ecuadorian clients live. To be sure, he sought also to do well for himself while doing good for others, but there was nothing wrong with that. In the end, however, he and the Ecuadorian lawyers he led corrupted the Lago Agrio case. They submitted fraudulent evidence. They coerced one judge, first to use a court appointed, supposedly impartial, “global expert” to make an overall damages assessment and, then, to appoint to that important role a man whom Donziger hand picked and paid to “totally play ball” with the LAPs. They then paid a Colorado consulting firm secretly to write all or most of the global expert’s report, falsely presented the report as the work of the court-appointed and supposedly impartial expert, and told half-truths or worse to U.S. courts in attempts to prevent exposure of that and other wrongdoing. Ultimately, the LAP team wrote the Lago Agrio court’s Judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge to rule in their favor and sign their judgment. If ever there were a case warranting equitable relief with
respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it.

...

[O]ne Ecuadorian legal team member, in a moment of panicky candor, admitted that if documents exposing just part of what they had done were to come to light, “apart from destroying the proceeding, all of us, your attorneys, might go to jail.”
It is time to face the facts.

Apparently it was a seriously-offered legal argument that bribery of judges for favorable rulings is just the way it's done in Ecuador, so, you know, we ought to respect their rules and enforce their judgment here in America.

posted by Ace at 05:55 PM

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