Caso Chevron

Chevron-Ecuador Feud Still Alive In The Netherlands

Ecuador has asked the Netherlands' highest court to nix an arbitral award finding that an $8.6 billion judgment issued by an Ecuadorian court against Chevron had been tainted by fraud.

Law 360 - Caroline Simson 30/09/2022

Ecuador has asked the Netherlands' highest court to nix an arbitral award finding that an $8.6 billion judgment issued by an Ecuadorian court against Chevron had been tainted by fraud / Picture: Shutterstock

Ecuador has asked the Netherlands' highest court to nix an arbitral award finding that an $8.6 billion judgment issued by an Ecuadorian court against Chevron had been tainted by fraud / Picture: Shutterstock

Ecuador has asked the Netherlands' highest court to nix an arbitral award finding that an $8.6 billion judgment issued by an Ecuadorian court against Chevron had been tainted by fraud, signaling that their epic feud stemming from pollution in the Amazon is not over yet.

The country's attorney general's office said in a statement on Twitter that it had asked the Dutch Supreme Court on Tuesday to overturn a ruling issued by a lower court in late June refusing to annul the award.

The statement said Ecuador "will not cease in its efforts to defend the interests of the Ecuadorian state and its assets."

The award in question, issued by a Permanent Court of Arbitration tribunal in 2018, concluded that parts of the $8.6 billion judgment had been corruptly "ghostwritten" by representatives of the plaintiffs who had sued Chevron and that Ecuador committed a denial of justice by issuing and enforcing it.

Those representatives included disgraced human rights attorney Steven Donziger, who has since been disbarred and convicted of criminal contempt for disobeying court orders in a civil case Chevron brought against him. Earlier this month, Donziger asked the U.S. Supreme Court to revisit the contempt conviction.

The $8.6 billion judgment had been issued in 2011 to indigenous Ecuadorians who alleged that Chevron was responsible for extensive environmental damage in the Lago Agrio region of the Amazon caused by its predecessor, Texaco Inc, decades ago.

The PCA tribunal also found in the award that Ecuador had wrongly ignored its obligations in a 1995 settlement it had inked with Chevron subsidiary Texaco Petroleum Co., under which TexPet agreed to undertake remedial environmental work in the area it had operated in the country in exchange for being released from further liability for any environmental impact.

Chevron on Thursday declined to comment on this latest appeal, citing the ongoing nature of the case.

But over the years, the company has convinced both the PCA tribunal and courts in several jurisdictions that it was the target of a massive fraud perpetrated by Donziger.

Chevron sued Donziger in New York's Southern District under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act in 2011, claiming that he and his cohorts in Ecuador engineered the lawsuit against Chevron through a host of illegal acts, including paying thousands in bribes for favorable court orders and offering the presiding judge a cut of the eventual award in exchange for passing off a ghostwritten judgment as his own.

In 2014, U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan declared the $8.6 billion Amazon pollution judgment against Chevron to be the product of an "egregious fraud" by Donziger.

Donziger was disbarred in 2020 after a New York state appeals court concluded that he had engaged in obstruction of justice, witness tampering, judicial coercion and bribery.

The long-running dispute between Chevron and Ecuador has its origins in a 1973 agreement with Chevron subsidiary Texaco Petroleum Co., which Chevron acquired in 2001, under which TexPet agreed to develop Ecuadorean oil fields in exchange for providing below-market oil to the country for domestic use.

Case and counsel information for the Dutch Supreme Court proceeding was not immediately available on Thursday.

Fuente Original

Notas relacionadas

ver más