Will the Supreme Court Strike Down Chevron's Facially Corrupt RICO Case?

Reposted from the Huffington Post.

Okay folks, the briefs are in. (And online, except Chevron's opposition, which I've seen but which Chevron seems to be hiding from the internet.) Our side will still file a reply, but nonetheless it's go time on the petition to the Supreme Court to review the shameful U.S. lower court judgments in Chevron's unapologetically corrupt RICO attack on its Ecuadorian contamination victims and their lawyer, Steven Donziger.

The Donziger/Ecuadorian brief is here. Necessarily, its arguments are limited to the narrow legal grounds that justify the Supreme Court’s discretionary intervention at this point. (The Supreme Court receives around 8,000 petitions each year and agrees to hear on 60-80 of them, or less than 1%). Nonetheless, it sets out two strong reasons for review: (1) the disturbing implications of allowing a losing party in foreign litigation like Chevron to use the RICO statute to launch a collateral attack in its "chosen forum," i.e. its home-country courts, and (2) of allowing a party to sue in RICO solely for "injunctive" relief. This latter argument is significant because a party can demand injunctive relief without having to present its case to a jury. In this case, Chevron dropped all its money damages claims on the eve of trial so that only Judge Kaplan (the notoriously biased district court judge who stated on the record that Chevron was "a company of considerable importance to our economy" and that the Ecuador case was the product of the "imagination" of "American lawyers") would have the power to decide the case, not a jury.

Subsequently, a variety of scholars and civil society groups filed briefs outlining broader and yet more disturbing implications of allowing Chevron’s collateral attack to stand. For example, one group of leading organizations such as Friends of the Earth stated:

[We] regularly engage in First Amendment-protected activities similar to those that were found to be predicate acts under RICO in this case. [If the case is allowed to go forward, our] exercise of [our] First Amendment rights of free speech, association, and petitioning government will be severely chilled by the very real possibility that [we] will have to mount costly defenses to retaliatory litigation brought by deep-pocketed corporations whose conduct Amici publicly oppose.

Another group of organizations took a closer look at the deeply corrupt nature of the "evidence" that Chevron used to support its core claims in the case, such as the claim that there was a bribery agreement – a claim solely supported by the testimony of a "fact" witness, Alberto Guerra, to whom Chevron directed over $2 million in cash and benefits. (Paying fact witnesses for their testimony is illegal.) See more here, here, here, and here.

The Republic of Ecuador also filed a brief condemning the process of U.S. courts, in particular highlighting how U.S. courts repeatedly (but not surprisingly) misunderstood Ecuadorian law and procedure. In his 500-page opinion, the U.S. trial judge went on and on about how this or that was a "fraud" on the Ecuadorian court, under Ecuadorian law, that somehow required heroic efforts by a U.S. judge to step in and save the day. Please. Ecuador’s Supreme Court, the real expert in Ecuadorian law, considered the exact same allegations and summed up the reality of the situation:

[Chevron] never demonstrated fraud, which it has been claiming without any legal support. We reiterate that it has not proven any omission or violation of procedure that would give rise to the nullity sought. [Chevron’s] incessant harping in this regard departs from procedural good faith.

Just as important as all the briefs is the recent release of a damning new Report highlighting the corrupt foundations of Chevron's RICO case (e.g., its reliance on Guerra despite sign after sign of his corruption and falsity), and providing detailed responses to all the various secondary smears and allegations in the "demonization" campaign (Chevron's own words) that Chevron used to drive hysteria and momentum in order to get the case over the finish line.

The report paints an ugly picture of U.S. courts embracing, tacitly adopting, or even just tolerating extreme corruption and foul play by a U.S. company in its blatantly self-serving and out-of-bounds legal attack against an historic human rights case. Why would U.S. courts do this? There are surely some long and complicated answers to this question, but also some simple ones. Consider this quote by the district judge (Lewis A. Kaplan, effectively chosen by Chevron to hear the case), stated out loud from the bench in the opening days of the RICO case:

[W]e are dealing here with a company of considerable importance to our economy that employs thousands all over the world, that supplies a group of commodities, gasoline, heating oil, other fuels and lubricants on which every one of us depends every single day. I don’t think there is anybody in this courtroom who wants to pull his car into a gas station to fill up and finds that there isn’t any gas there because these folks [the Ecuadorians] have attached it in Singapore or wherever else [as part of enforcing their judgment].

It's just dumbfounding how biased this is – and just ridiculous. That the judge's desire to protect Chevron could be driven to such levels of ridiculousness speaks to the depth of the bias. Or consider this quote, also from the bench in a related proceeding before the RICO case even began:

The imagination of American lawyers is just without parallel in the world. It is our one absolutely overwhelming comparative advantage against the rest of the world, apart from medicine. You know, we used to do a lot of other things. Now we cure people and we kill them with interrogatories. It’s a sad pass. But that’s where we are. And Mr. Donziger [with the Ecuador judgment] is trying to become the next big thing in fixing the balance of payments deficit. I got it from the beginning.

Boy, you couldn't see where this case was going, could you?

Where it went was a place just as ugly as these quotes suggest – in fact, uglier, because as detailed in the amicus and in the new report, Chevron sunk to new depths by paying Guerra massive sums of money to invent a "bribery" claim, and Judge Kaplan bought it.

What we are left with is a patently disgraceful picture of a swaggering U.S. company which (1) engineered a dismissal of environmental claims to Ecuador, (2) didn't like the result it got in Ecuador, (3) came running back to its home country courts for protection; and (4) despite a mountain of international and domestic legal principles that should have prevented it, got the U.S. courts to jump to its aid. Specifically, it got a "freestanding determination of the facts" (Chevron's words) that is unconnected from any specific legal relief but that gives Chevron a new weapon to wave around in enforcement jurisdictions (as the Ecuadorians, as they should and must, go about enforcing their judgment in various countries around the world).

Ultimately, the RICO judgment should not stop any of these enforcement actions, because those non-U.S. courts are perfectly capable of coming to their own views on Chevron’s bogus "fraud" claims and are not going to roll over to corrupt/paid evidence the way U.S. courts did. But it will certainly give Chevron yet more delay, in a case which has already gone on for nearly 25 years while each year more and more victims die and new generations of children are poisoned

The Supreme Court has one last chance to stop Chevron’s self-serving legal circus from becoming law of the land and a stain on U.S. legal history. It has a chance to do something to help the underlying human tragedy.

The odds are overwhelmingly against review as a general matter, but we must still hope.

17 Environmental Groups Criticize Chevron Before Supreme Court for Faking Evidence

Reposted from The Chevron Pit.

Seventeen prominent environmental and human groups have gone to the U.S. Supreme Court to criticize Chevron and its legal team for fabricating evidence in the historic Ecuador pollution case and for violating the Free Speech rights of the company's critics.

The filing of the latest "friend of the court" briefs (see here and here) from the civil society groups is profoundly important. It is another example of how Chevron continues to lose support in the Ecuador case after being hit with a historic $9.5 billion environmental judgment in 2013 for dumping billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon rainforest, decimating indigenous groups and causing an outbreak of cancer. That judgment was affirmed unanimously by Ecuador's Supreme Court in the forum where Chevron had accepted jurisdiction.

The amicus briefs before the U.S. Supreme Court underscore why Chevron officials and company lawyers might be subject to sanctions, or even criminal prosecution, for intentionally presenting fraudulent evidence and for illegally paying for favorable witness testimony.

The latest briefs urge the justices to reverse a decision from a retaliatory "racketeering" (or RICO) case filed by Chevron in New York before Judge Lewis A. Kaplan targeting the villagers and their lawyers. Chevron tried to use its false evidence in that case to undermine the Ecuador judgment and to silence the company's growing chorus of critics, including some of its own shareholders who have challenged company management over its mishandling of the case.

Called a mockery of justice by the villagers, the Chevron "racketeering" case had no real legal basis and was unprecedented in the 241-year history of the United States, according to another amicus brief submitted by 19 law scholars and this appeal by New York human rights attorney Steven Donziger.

Those briefs demonstrate that prior to Chevron's case before Kaplan, a U.S. court had never before permitted a party that had lost a judgment in a foreign court where it had accepted jurisdiction to come home to collaterally attack that judgment -- a recipe for judicial chaos and unending forum shopping as litigations jump across countries and continents with no final resolution, as the law scholars emphasized.

The law scholars told the justices that Kaplan's decision not only violates international law, but puts the entire U.S. government in violation of international law by letting a solitary America trial judge try to dictate to all foreign judges from all countries how they should rule on a case. Kaplan tried just that by purporting to block the villagers from collecting on their judgment anywhere in the world.

The Ecuador judgment was affirmed in 2013 after three layers of courts in Ecuador found that Chevron had dumped billions of gallons of toxic oil waste into the rainforest, decimating indigenous groups and poisoning natural water sources relied on by tens of thousands of people. (For a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron, see here.) After betraying its promise to pay any adverse judgment in Ecuador, Chevron filed the "racketeering" case and saw Kaplan make what can only be described as a bizarre ruling from his Manhattan courtroom.

Kaplan ruled that as a general matter Ecuador's entire judiciary was "illegal" and therefore incapable of producing valid court judgments. He did this after refusing to consider any of the voluminous scientific evidence that was relied on by Ecuador's courts to find Chevron liable. The weakness of the decision is that it is utterly unenforceable in other countries. More to the point, it is a shocking example of American judicial imperialism.

Kaplan's decision predictably has been rejected in Canada, where courts have given the villagers the green light to try to seize Chevron's assets with the unanimous backing of the country's Supreme Court. Courts in Brazil are also allowing an enforcement action against Chevron's assets in that country to proceed. It is only a matter of time before Chevron is forced to pay up in full given that it has an estimated $15 billion of assets in Canada and another $3 billion in Brazil.

One of the new amicus briefs, filed by Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network, attacked Chevron for illegally paying an admittedly corrupt witness $2 million in cash and benefits to claim that the Ecuador judgment was "ghostwritten" by the plaintiffs. That witness, the former Ecuadorian judge Alberto Guerra, offered no corroborating evidence for his claim and later admitted under oath that he lied about key parts of the story in Kaplan's court.

The U.S. federal appellate court that oversees Kaplan, in reflexively affirming his ruling, ignored the undisputed evidence that Guerra lied and that his ghostwriting story has been completely debunked by new scientific evidence that became available after the end of the RICO trial.

Paul Paz y Mino, Associate Director of Amazon Watch, offered this powerful comment in a press release about the need for the Supreme Court to review the flawed U.S. court decisions:

It is imperative that the Supreme Court take action to stop what might be one of the most disturbing abuses of our civil justice system in history. To avoid compensating its victims in Ecuador, Chevron bribed a witness, fabricated evidence, and committed crimes and fraud before a U.S. court.

Erich Pica, from the U.S. environmental group Friends of the Earth, also criticized Chevron for using the RICO case as a pretext to intimidate company critics by issuing them subpoenas seeking privileged documents. Chevron served the subpoenas on dozens of environmental groups, bloggers, journalists, consultants and lawyers. All the recipients had tried to the help the Ecuadorian villagers or expose some aspect of Chevron's wrongdoing in Ecuador.

Pica said:

Corporate accountability advocates must not be at risk from legal action by U.S. corporations simply for expressing their First Amendment rights to free speech. As it stands, this [RICO] decision endangers the very foundation of human rights and environmental advocacy. That is why Friends of the Earth has filed this brief along with others in the environmental and human rights community.

Chevron suffered another blow when the 19 law scholars also filed an amicus brief in support of the Ecuadorian communities. Another prominent environmental group, Earth Rights International, published a riveting account of how Chevron tried to sabotage the Ecuador trial via corruption and improper pressure. Kaplan ignored evidence of Chevron's corruption in the Ecuador trial as well.

The Ecuador pollution matter clearly has become groundbreaking litigation in the global corporate accountability movement. It threatens the business model of the entire fossil fuel industry which relies to a shocking degree on externalizing its pollution costs to keep profits flowing at artificially high levels. As Chevron's profits gush, cancer rates in Ecuador's Amazon soar.

The Ecuador pollution case is also a major test for the U.S. judiciary. That judiciary thus far deserves an abject failing grade for lending its stamp of approval to Chevron's corruption and Kaplan's abuse of judicial power.

Compared to Ecuador's judiciary, which had the institutional fortitude to resist Chevron's attempts to corrupt the proceedings, U.S. courts thus far have bent over backwards to bless Chevron's bribery of a witness and other outrageous misconduct. It's a sad pass to say the least.

The Ecuador pollution litigation now presents a major test for the integrity of the U.S. Supreme Court. The justices can choose either to step up and defend the rule of law, or allow the egregious injustice committed in the RICO matter to continue to stain our nation and its court system.

Chevron's Illegal Payments To Witnesses Should Prompt Supreme Court To Reconsider Case

Reposted from EarthRights International.

For nearly three decades, Ecuadorian communities have tried to hold Texaco (now Chevron) accountable for the company's legacy of oil pollution in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The saga has stretched across the globe, across multiple court rooms and tribunals, and yet justice for the Ecuadorian victims remains elusive. This week, we told a side of this saga that hasn't really been heard. On behalf of our friends at Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network, we filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court that details the illegal and unethical tactics Chevron and its lawyers used to try to obstruct judicial proceedings in Ecuador and obtain favorable testimony in the U.S. proceedings to support its retaliatory suit against the Ecuadorian victims and their lawyers.

I can't do justice to the complex and multifaceted history of the Chevron/Ecuador saga in a blog post, but here's a basic recap of how things got to where they are now: Ecuadorian villagers first filed suit against Texaco, whose operations in Ecuador were marked by egregious disrespect for local communities and their environment, in federal court in New York in 1993. After nearly 10 years of arguing over which court should hear the dispute, Texaco (which became a part of Chevron) convinced the court the case should be dismissed and heard in Ecuador instead, praising the fairness of the Ecuadorian judiciary. In 2003, the Ecuadorians refiled the case against Chevron in Ecuador. After years of litigation, the Ecuadorian court ruled in favor of the communities in 2011, issuing a multi-billion dollar judgment against Chevron for the devastation its operations left behind. Chevron appealed the decision and the appellate court, and Ecuador's highest court, both upheld the verdict ordering Chevron to pay to clean up the mess it left behind.

Sounds like that should be the end of the story, right? Hardly. Chevron, which no longer had assets in Ecuador, refused to pay. Instead, Chevron launched a retaliatory campaign against Ecuador, the Ecuadorians, their lawyers, and a wide range of other organizations and activists who had supported them. Chevron filed an international arbitration claim against the Government of Ecuador – before the Ecuadorian court had even issued its decision – alleging the judicial proceedings over its pollution of the Ecuadorian Amazon violated the company's rights as an investor. (Under a treaty between the U.S. and Ecuador known as a "Bilateral Investment Treaty," foreign corporations investing in Ecuador can have investment disputes heard in front of a panel of private arbitrators.)

Chevron also returned to the U.S. and filed suit in federal court in New York, asking the court to prohibit the Ecuadorians from enforcing any judgment issued by Ecuador anywhere in the world. Despite the fact that Chevron chose to have this case heard in Ecuador, over the objections of the Ecuadorians and their lawyers, Chevron now claimed the Ecuadorian courts were corrupt and incapable of issuing an impartial judgment fit for recognition and enforcement in our courts. The suit claimed the Ecuadorian victims, their lawyers, activists, and even Chevron's own shareholders were all a part of a massive conspiracy and a "public pressure campaign" to try to force Chevron to settle fraudulent claims.

The suit also brought claims under the racketeering and organized crime statute – known as RICO – alleging the Ecuadorians lawyers had procured the Ecuadorian judgment by fraudulent means. It's worth noting what Chevron did not argue – it never tried to show the Ecuadorian court got it wrong and Chevron wasn't responsible for the massive contamination. The RICO proceedings were utterly bizarre, defying all assumptions about how our legal system is supposed to work. (I recommend reading Marissa's description of what it was like when she volunteered on the trial before coming to work for us.) But in 2014, following a very strange bench trial, the judge ruled for Chevron.

The Ecuadorians and their lawyers are now petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to hear their appeal. The brief we filed this week, which asks the Court to grant certiorari and hear their case, focuses on the facts that the trial court didn't consider: specifically, Chevron's misconduct in Ecuador and in the U.S. proceedings. In Ecuador, Chevron tampered with evidence of pollution, lied to the Ecuadorian court, paid millions of dollars to avoid damaging testimony, and sought to entrap a judge in a fabricated bribery scandal, creating the appearance of corruption in order to prevent enforcement in case it lost the case in Ecuador. Chevron continued to use dirty tactics in the U.S. proceedings, which ultimately led the trial court to make critical factual errors – errors we now know were simply wrong.

Central to Chevron's case below was its claim that the Ecuadorians' legal team had offered (but never paid) a bribe to the Ecuadorian judge to let them "ghostwrite" the judgment. Despite virtually limitless discovery, including access to the Ecuadorians' lawyers' litigation files, documents, hard drives, and even a personal diary, Chevron's lawyers never produced any direct evidence – no draft judgment, nor any communications by Petitioners evidencing a ghostwriting or bribery scheme.

Instead, all it could produce was the testimony of Alberto Guerra, an admittedly corrupt former judge who had previously tried to solicit a bribe from Chevron, and who came with a multi-million-dollar price tag. The trial court's decision relied heavily on Guerra's testimony and it is the only evidence for numerous conclusions. But Guerra subsequently admitted to lying on the stand during the trial about central facts of his bribery and ghostwriting allegations, and much of the "corroborating evidence" that supposedly supported Guerra's bought-and-paid for testimony has been refuted in later proceedings.

Chevron's conduct below shows why courts normally don't hear cases that seek, as Chevron did here, to have a court preemptively bar enforcement of a foreign judgment, before the winners have even tried to enforce it. Litigation would never end because the loser could always challenge a ruling in another forum. Indeed, if that's now allowed, then Chevron's misdeeds here – for example, payment of illegal gratuities and bribes to witnesses in exchange for favorable testimony, which violate U.S. law – could easily give the Ecuadorians and their lawyers a basis to turn to the courts in yet another country to file suit attacking the U.S. trial court's judgment as procured by fraud and unenforceable.

We don't know whether the Supreme Court will agree to hear the case. But this saga is far from over regardless of whether the Court hears it – the Ecuadorians are still pursuing enforcement proceedings in Canada, and the arbitration panel hearing Chevron's case against Ecuador has yet to rule. We can't help but wonder whether Chevron and its attorneys at Gibson Dunn may one day soon find themselves in the position of having to answer for their wrongdoing in these proceedings.

Chevron's False Evidence in Ecuador Now Before U.S. Supreme Court

Reposted from The Chevron Pit.

Chevron's false evidence used to fraudulently cover up its legal responsibility for a $12 billion pollution judgment in Ecuador has been put before the U.S. Supreme Court. This is a real test of the High Court's own ability to police lower court judges who get involved in judicial corruption.

The filing by Steven Donziger, the longtime U.S. lawyer for the affected rainforest communities, is the latest chapter in the campaign to hold the oil giant accountable for dumping billions of gallons of oil waste and causing a humanitarian crisis in the rainforest. Chevron lost the case in Ecuador, leading to a $12 billion judgment that is currently being enforced in Canada.

The company retaliated against Donziger and his clients by filing a civil "racketeering" (RICO) case in U.S. court before a judge who clearly was licking his chops to send a message to the courts of Ecuador and the rest of the developing world to keep their paws off a powerful U.S. oil company -- even if meant accepting distorted, untruthful, and corrupt evidence.

From a new press release on the filing:

Ecuadorian rainforest villagers and their longtime U.S. human rights lawyer have presented proof of Chevron's bribes, false evidence, and fraud to the U.S. Supreme Court as part of a petition to overturn an unprecedented RICO decision by controversial U.S. trial judge Lewis A. Kaplan.

The petition to the U.S. Supreme Court points out that the RICO decision in favor of Chevron is the product of falsified evidence and judicial bias by the trial judge, the aforementioned Mr. Kaplan. After repeatedly signaling his support for Chevron, Kaplan refused to seat a jury and let Chevron drop all damages claims on the eve of trial to prevent a group of impartial fact finders from deciding the case.

Chevron's false evidence included testimony from an admittedly corrupt Ecuadorian witness, Alberto Guerra. Chevron paid Guerra a $2 million bribe, including $38,000 in cash out of a backpack, to become its homegrown patsy. At the time, he had been making $500 per month.

Chevron lawyers led by Randy Mastro then coached Guerra for 53 consecutive days before he took the stand in Kaplan's courtroom. "Money talks, but gold screams," Guerra told Chevron's lawyers when he negotiated his "fee" for testifying. Chevron also gave Guerra health care, a car, an immigration lawyer, and paid his taxes after he was moved to the U.S.

Needless to say, having enriched himself at Chevron's expense, Guerra had virtually no credibility when he took the stand in Kaplan's courtroom. What little he had disappeared completely when he blatantly lied under oath under the bright lights, as was evident to most observers.

Even though he was prepped meticulously by Chevron, Guerra could not keep his story straight. He claimed the villagers arranged for a bribe to the trial judge so they could write the judgment against Chevron. But that story fell apart when a forensic examination of the judge's office computer showed he wrote the judgment by saving it as a Word document at least 480 times in the weeks leading up to its issuance. Guerra had claimed it was given to the judge on a flash drive.

No corroborating evidence ever emerged that a bribe of the judge occurred.

Guerra also admitted to perjuring himself before Kaplan on several key points when he was cross-examined in a separate international arbitration proceeding after the end of the RICO trial. Yet Kaplan -- who repeatedly called the Ecuadorians the "so-called" plaintiffs and who made comments widely construed as racist -- credited Guerra in an obvious attempt to help rescue Chevron from the entirely appropriate liability imposed by Ecuador's courts. Here is a summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron in the Ecuador trial.

Given that BP has paid out about $50 billion for its Gulf of Mexico spill, Chevron actually got it off easy for its far worse contamination of the rainforest. The company abandoned roughly 1,000 open-air waste pits gouged out of the jungle floor which continue to contaminate soils and groundwater to this day. Most were built in the 1970s. Cancer rates in the affected area have skyrocketed.

Kaplan's mishandling of the case becomes even more outrageous when one considers it was Chevron that insisted the trial take place in Ecuador. In the 1990s, the company filed 14 affidavits in U.S. federal court praising Ecuador's judicial system. To help Chevron get out of the conundrum of having lost in the forum of its choosing, Kaplan determined that Ecuador's entire judicial system was incapable of producing fair verdicts even though Chevron had repeatedly lauded the country's courts.

It also turns out that Kaplan never revealed that during the RICO trial he held investments in Chevron. In an act utterly devoid of ethics, he never disclosed his financial connection to the company even though Donziger and his colleagues twice tried to remove him from the case for bias.

Kaplan also called the Ecuador litigation "mud wrestling" and said Donziger's goal was to use the case to "fix the balance of payments of deficit" of the United States.  "I got it from the beginning," he said. And that was before he held as much as an evidentiary hearing.

Whether the U.S. Supreme Court will step in to police what can only be described as judicial corruption remains to be seen. But don't hold your breath. In recent years, our appellate courts shown little but hostility to foreign plaintiffs who come to our shores to hold American companies accountable for their misconduct abroad.

It is important to remember that Chevron's dirty work in manufacturing evidence for Kaplan was farmed out to the U.S. law firm Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in a practice group headed by the notorious Mastro, the former deputy to New York Mayor Rudy Guliani. Known for his divisive approach to politics, Mastro was largely hated in New York's black and Latino communities when he worked as a public official. It was Mastro who steered the case to Kaplan.

Donziger called Mastro "a corporate hit man of the worst order."

"My experience is that Mastro and his cohorts will do virtually anything, including paying witnesses massive sums of money, to help rescue clients in trouble if the fees are high enough and they believe the judge is friendly enough to protect them," Donziger said. Federal judges twice sanctioned Gibson Dunn for using the discovery process to harass the Ecuadorians. (See here for a history of the firm's many ethical problems.)

Called a "warhorse lawyer" by Rolling Stone magazine, Donziger said this in the press release:

It is our view that Kaplan and the Second Circuit owe the people of Ecuador an apology for refusing to consider evidence that blows up Chevron's false narrative. This is an ongoing stain on the American judiciary in the eyes of the world and it will not go away unless and until the Supreme Court acts.

A larger issue is that Chevron created the RICO strategy as a playbook for polluting corporations to retaliate against human rights lawyers and their clients who hold them accountable. The playbook is designed to threaten advocates who dare challenge the false company narrative. It no doubt represents a grave threat to social justice advocacy. Retaliatory corporate lawsuits are an intimidation tool designed to drive away lawyers and leave human rights victims utterly defenseless.

Chevron even admitted in an email that its strategy was "to demonize Donziger" to distract attention from the fact is deliberately dumped oil waste into the rainforest, decimating indigenous groups and causing a humanitarian crisis that has killed or threatens to kill thousands.

Chevron has used at least 60 law firms and 2,000 lawyers, at a cost in excess of $2 billion, to try to run Donziger and his colleagues off the case. It has not worked. Since Chevron launched its attacks in 2009, the company has lost the underlying case in Ecuador; seen it affirmed unanimously by Ecuador's Supreme Court; and seen Canada's Supreme Court unanimously reject Chevron's attempt to block a seizure action against its assets in that country.

Chevron knows it is in serious trouble in the Ecuador matter. It's strategy is to keep kicking the can down the road, thinking it will be cheaper to pay up far in the future.

In the meantime, Donziger and his clients have attracted top legal talent to their cause -- including John Keker of Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco, Alan Lenczer of Lenczer Slaght in Toronto, and Sergio Bermudes who is one of the top litigators in Brazil. Many other law firms are helping as the villagers maintain enforcement actions against Chevron to force compliance with the judgment.

Chevron CEO John Watson and General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate, who make a combined $30 million annually while the average annual income of their victims is about $1,000, have very little to show for their jihad against the Ecuadorians. Their problem is that regardless of whether the U.S. Supreme Court decides to take the case, the horse has escaped the barn.

Having decided to litigate elsewhere, there is now nothing a U.S. court can do to rescue Chevron from its growing financial liability to the people of Ecuador. But there is much the High Court can do to restore our judiciary in the eyes of the world and protect the First Amendment rights of social justice advocates.

It can start by using the Chevron pollution case to sanction Kaplan for letting a major American oil company try to evade liability by corrupting our system of justice with lies, fraud, and bribes.

Why Canadian Courts Care about Justice in Ecuador

Reposted from Huffington Post.

Marta Isabel Arrobo, 49, recalls the numerous health problems she and her family have encountered living in close proximity to several pits of the Sur-Oeste Station. Photo credit: Amazon Watch

Jay Cameron asks some important questions in his deeply flawed pro-Chevron opinion piece about one of the biggest environmental crimes in history. We think he deserves some answers, but despite repeated requests the Financial Post declined to even respond to our requests to publish this response. Fortunately, here we can provide the answers to Cameron's questions, but some basic facts about the case that Cameron gets wrong must be corrected first.

First, the title of the piece itself is false, since U.S. courts didn't "originally rule" in the Chevron case. In 2011, after almost two decades of legal wrangling and based on thousands of scientific samples – most of which were provided by Chevron itself – an Ecuadorian court ruled Chevron liable for the amount of US $18 billion to pay for environmental cleanup, health care costs and punitive damages for the crime – admitted to by Chevron – of deliberately dumping over 18 billion gallons of toxic oil drilling water into the once pristine Amazon rainforest, home to 30,000 inhabitants. This trial took place in the venue of Chevron's choice: Ecuador. The "original ruling" on that decision was the Ecuadorian appeals court and later its Supreme Court, which eliminated the punitive damages on constitutional grounds and halved the judgement to US $9.5 billion. Those courts dismissed Chevron's fraud claims after considering the "evidence." Furthermore, the civil suit brought against Chevron was perfectly legal in Ecuador since the "release" given by a prior Ecuadorian administration specifically did not protect Chevron from civil claims, a fact that Chevron itself did not dispute when it argued that Ecuador was the proper venue for this case.

Mr. Cameron refers to "court-tested proof" of fraud in Chevron's retaliatory U.S. suit filed after the Ecuadorian verdict. That is false. In fact, it might interest Mr. Cameron to know that not a single piece of evidence about the actual contamination was even permitted in that trial. Cameron also omits the fact that Chevron's fraud claims were based almost wholly on the testimony of a corrupt ex-judge who later admitted, during another Chevron forum-shopping legal case, that he lied about the alleged bribe. Worse yet, the actual "proof" – the forensic evidence about the authorship of the original Ecuadorian judgment – was not considered by the US court, despite the fact that it validates the Ecuadorian plaintiffs' claims that the judgement was not ghost-written. The Canadian courts, however, were made aware of these facts. They also know about the leaked Chevron videos showing their own technicians finding toxic contamination at former well site Chevron swore to have completely remediated (more evidence that Kaplan refused to allow in his court despite Chevron's lawyers having authenticated them).

Ultimately, the courts in Canada have seen through Chevron's attempt to abuse the legal system with its might and fabricate false stories to escape justice for a crime that still festers in 1,000 unlined open-air pits like scars across the Amazon. Those same courts also realize that Ecuadorians are still dying today from contamination from those pits. They will offer Chevron a chance to explain itself in a trial and Chevron is perfectly welcome to put its key witness on the stand. But will they risk it, since he has already admitted to having lied for them in exchange for a multi-million dollar payoff?

To answer Mr. Cameron's question, the reason the Canadian courts considered the valid claims of the 30,000 Ecuadorian victims of one of the worst corporate crimes in history is because they realize that facts and justice do, in fact, matter.