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Two New Hurdles Hinder $18B Chevron Judgment
Two New Hurdles Hinder $18B Chevron Judgment
MANHATTAN (CN) - An international arbitration panel ordered Ecuador to stop its courts from enforcing an $18 billion judgment against Chevron, on the same day a U.S. federal judge put up a new hurdle standing in between indigenous Ecuadoreans seeking to collect award.
...
Chevron fought the verdict as fraudulent - and claimed it should never have been tried in the first place because of a $40 million settlement agreement its predecessor Texaco signed with the Ecuadorean government in 1995.
A group of Ecuadorean natives claimed that they were not bound by their government's agreement, which they insisted Texaco broke by conducting a "sham" clean up that did not mitigate the pollution's impacts.
...
But a United Nations trade arbitration panel reached a different conclusion on Thursday, ruling that Ecuador must quash its citizens' case.
"This arbitration panel has just lost the last remnants of its legitimacy by trying to order a sovereign nation to violate its own Constitution and quash the legal claims of citizens who are literally dying off in the rainforest due to Chevron's pollution," Hinton said.
http://www.courthousenews.com/2012/02/17/44012.htm