[CaptainCrunch]

The Lawsuit around ecological damage in Ecuador involving Chevron in the Canadian Court Systems laid to rest


https://business.financialpost.com/o...box=1562945202

After clogging up the Canadian court system for seven years, an utterly corrupt multibillion-dollar lawsuit against California-based oil company Chevron on behalf of “poor Ecuadorean villagers” was finally dismissed by the Ontario Superior Court of Justice last Friday.


The suit, dubbed “the fraud of the century” by The Wall Street Journal, related to pollution caused by Texaco — a company that Chevron acquired in 2001 — when Texaco had been operating in Ecuador before 1992. In fact, Texaco had paid for — and the Ecuadorean government had agreed to — remediation payments, but then a buccaneering American lawyer named Steve Donziger got into the act. A classmate of Barack Obama, Donziger engineered a US$9.5-billion judgment against Chevron in Ecuador. He had no trouble recruiting then-Ecuadorean president Rafael Correa to the cause. Correa, a typical leftist caudillo, was already well acquainted with environmental blackmail. In 2010, his government, with the backing of the United Nations, suggested that unless the international community paid Ecuador US$3.6 billion, it would have no alternative but to bulldoze its own rainforest. The international community demurred.

Donziger knew that big corporations, faced with complex lawsuits and a media circus, often simply pay up rather than risk brand damage. Chevron, by contrast, and commendably, said it would fight Donziger until hell froze over, then continue fighting on the ice. The company brought a civil suit against Donziger in the U.S. and in March 2014, the District Court for the Southern District of New York found that Donziger had obtained the Ecuadorean judgment via extortion, money laundering, wire fraud, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act violations, witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Donziger appealed but the damning judgment was upheld. Southern District Judge Lewis Kaplan stated that, “The wrongful actions of Donziger and his Ecuadorean legal team would be offensive to the laws of any nation that aspires to the rule of law.” He was perhaps looking north, where the case was meandering through the Canadian system.

Donziger, meanwhile, having been disbarred and having persistently refused to comply with U.S. court orders to stop raising money for his assault on Chevron, provide details of his backers, or surrender his passport, may now — at long last — be facing jail time.

https://business.financialpost.com/o...ood-wont-touch


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lago_Agrio_oil_field


https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/ar...cuador-lawsuit


https://www.forbes.com/sites/michael.../#41e73adb7bd3


I think its pretty interesting reading.