Caso Chevron

The Chevron Shakedown is finally reaching the Supreme Court

Hot Air - Jazz Shaw 23/05/2017

The last time we checked in on the progress of the Chevron Shakedown in November of last year, things were not looking good for Manhattan lawyer and convicted racketeer Steven Donziger. Following the numerous losses he had suffered in court over his fraudulent attempts to pick Chevron’s pockets to the tune of billions of dollars, he had been found by a federal judge to have engaged in racketeering through what was described as a, “multi-year campaign of fraud, bribery, extortion, money laundering, and other offenses.” All of that stemmed from the dishonest practices his team and their clients engaged in when originally “winning” a multi-billion dollar settlement from a corrupt judge in Ecuador. He appealed the decision, but in November the Second Circuit appeals court shot him down.

Now Donziger has only one chance left and it’s coming up shortly. Chevron has filed a brief with the Supreme Court asking them to affirm the lower court’s decision and turn Donziger away once and for all. (Yahoo News)

Time may be running short for New York lawyer Steven Donziger.

Chevron filed a brief this week, urging the U.S. Supreme Court to rebuff Donziger’s petition asking it to overturn a devastating judgment against him and his greatest achievement: a multibillion-dollar verdict in an environmental case he’d been pressing for more than 20 years.

Donziger’s campaign against Chevron reached its high-water mark six years ago, in March 2011, when he and a team of local lawyers won an $18 billion verdict—later reduced to $9.5 billion—in a provincial court in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, on behalf of residents of the Amazon region where Texaco, acquired by Chevron in 2001, had drilled from 1964 to 1992…

So unless Donziger can persuade the Supreme Court to intervene, the stain of Kaplan’s withering assessment of the Lago Agrio judgment—that it was the product of outlandish corruption—will become indelible. To be sure, Donziger will always be able to take that judgment to any other country where Chevron has assets and see if its courts are willing to enforce it.

As the linked article suggests, this may not be technically “the end” of this saga because Donziger can still continue his quest to go to courts in other countries and ask them to enforce the judgement. As we’ve covered here repeatedly, he’s already doing just that in Canada, but he hasn’t fared very well there so far either. But the key point of the upcoming SCOTUS decision (assuming they agree to speak to it) is that it’s the end of the line in the judicial process in Chevron’s home nation. If Donziger loses there he is forever branded a fraudulent racketeer by the highest court in the land.

Read more here.

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