DC: The Supreme Court of Gibraltar awarded the oil company Chevron $38 million Friday for damages related to charges alleging the company contaminated the Amazon region of Ecuador.
An Ecuador court issued an $18 billion judgement against Chevron in February 2011 for environmental and social harm the company allegedly caused to the Amazon. The amount was later reduced to $9.5 billion, but a U.S. district court in New York nullified the judgement due to fraudulent and illegal activities by Steven Donziger, the lead American lawyer behind the lawsuit, according to the district court ruling.
Donziger had set up a company in Gibraltar, Amazonia Recovery Ltd., through which to funnel the funds he and others thought they would win from the Chevron case. MORE
Ecuador, New York, Gibraltar … so … who wins?
Do these courts’ rulings have any bearing on the other courts’ rulings?
Who (besides the lawyers and judges) is actually gonna get paid?
I’m so confused!
izlamo delenda est …
Frivolous lawsuits. Next time you fill up at the pump, you know where your $3.50/gallon goes.
Send someone to jail. No, make that send a lot of someones to jail. Then we’ll see these fake suits end.
Donziger was slammed in US courts a few years ago for fraud in the same case.
The Correa regime made it a point to pay celebrities to go to the Amazon and have their picture taken in front of a pool of oil, alleged to have been from Texaco’s operations from the ’70’s. It turned out that the pool of oil was caused recently by Petroecuador.
Regarding the court systems in Latin America, Ecuador specifically, any judge can rule on any case. Judges are routinely shopped to the point that a family court judge in one city can hear a habeas corpus appeal on a criminal case from across the country and then release the defendant immediately.
In the Chevron case, Donziger and local provincial leaders teamed up with a corrupt local judge who ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, awarding them 18 billion dollars. With that kind of money in play, Correa’s team got involved — for a large piece of the action — and so commenced the PR campaign.
Again, be very careful when you go to a foreign country. Their laws are not our laws and their way of doing things is not our way of doing things. Josh Holt found that out, and hundreds, if not thousands, of naive and/or overconfident foreigners are caught in the web of corrupt judicial systems every year.
The Gibraltar ruling is just adding onto the pile of penalties that Donziger and his crooked plaintiffs have accrued since their case blew up. I hope it keeps getting bigger.
About time the Envirolunatics were made to pay for their harassment!
South American Judges learned their trade by watching US Judges and elected officials.
The corrupt establishment elite cross national boundaries…….”We Are the World” is playing in the background.