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Related: About this forumChevron Using 60 Law Firms and 2,000 Legal Personnel To Evade Ecuador Environmental Liability
CSR Press Release
Submitted by: Amazon Defense Coalition
Categories:Business Ethics, Environment
Posted: Mar 04, 2013 03:45 PM EST
Chevron Using 60 Law Firms and 2,000 Legal Personnel To Evade Ecuador Environmental Liability, Company Reports
NEW YORK, Mar. 04 /CSRwire/ - Chevron is deploying at least 2,000 lawyers and legal professionals from more than 60 law firms including 114 lawyers from the single U.S. firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher in an attempt to deny a fair trial to Ecuadorian villagers in New York as the oil giant furiously tries to contain the growing international fallout from its $19 billion Ecuador environmental liability, according to recent court filings in New York.
The new information was revealed in a U.S. court filing in New York, where Chevron has launched a fraud case against the indigenous and farmer villagers who brought suit against the company and two of their lawyers. In response, Chevron faces counterclaims accusing the company of using the fraud case as a smokescreen to distract attention from judicial findings in Ecuador that it committed environmental crimes, conducted a fraudulent remediation, and launched an intimidation campaign against judges in Ecuador.
Since an Ecuador court in 2011 found Chevron liable for $19.04 billion for the deliberate dumping of toxic waste when it operated in the country in the 1970s and 1980s, the affected indigenous and farmer communities have filed seizure lawsuits targeting roughly $15 billion in company assets in Canada, Argentina, and Brazil (see here) something Chevron describes as causing irreparable harm (http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/2011-02-15-mitchell-declaration.pdf) to its global operations. Additional seizure actions are slated soon for Colombia and other countries because Chevron refuses to comply with its legal obligations in Ecuador, according to Pablo Fajardo, lead counsel in the lawsuit.
Chevron is also under growing diplomatic pressure in Latin America over the Ecuador lawsuit. In recent days, a regional diplomatic body started by Venezuela in 2009 the Boliviarian Alliance for the Americas, or ALBA decided to take up the issue of Chevrons campaign to undermine the rule of law in Ecuador at the request of Ecuador President Rafael Correa. Venezuela Vice President Nicolas Maduro whose country holds billions of dollars of Chevron assets recently called for a regional meeting to address Chevrons aggression against Ecuador. (See article here http://www.europapress.es/latam/politica/noticia-ecuador-alba-rechaza-campana-sistematica-agresion-desprestigio-contra-ecuador-parte-chevron-20130301054104.html).
In a letter directed to U.S. Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who is overseeing the New York proceeding, the lawyers fighting the case accused Chevron of trying to inundate the Court and counsel with an avalanche of motions, papers, and complaints as part of its campaign to mount a show trial designed to bulldoze its way to a judgment.
This rush to judgment, this mismatch of resources, this abuse of the civil litigation system to bulldoze a result must stop, said the letter, which was signed by John Keker of Keker & Van Nest in San Francisco and Craig Smyser of Smyser, Kaplan & Veselka in Houston.
Let there be no mistake: this is not about delay, the letter continued. We look forward to a trial to a jury hearing our evidence. We ask for a fair trial, however, not a show trial.
Evidence of Chevrons avalanche of legal filings in the case, which is scheduled for trial in October, includes:
**The disclosure by Chevron that an estimated 2,000 legal personnel have worked on the case more people that inhabit many of the towns in the rain forest where toxic waste was dumped for 30 years, said the letter.
**Chevron submitted a privilege log to the court that was 15,000 pages long, made 224 legal filings just in the last three months, and produced some 6 million pages of discovery documents knowing the defendants could not review them in the short time allowed.
**Over the last 30 days alone, Chevron has served the defendants with more than 10,000 pages of motions, briefs, letters and notices.
**Chevron recently filed another baseless fraud lawsuit against a key supporter in Europe in a desperate effort to dry up funding for the case.
**Chevron listed 114 lawyers from Gibson Dunn as working on the case more than 10% of the lawyers in the entire firm, one of the largest in the world.
**Chevron has identified more than 60 law firms that have worked on the case including the prominent U.S. law firms King & Spalding, Jones Day, and Boies Schiller & Flexner.
The letter also noted that Judge Kaplan who has been accused of bias (see here link:http://thechevronpit.blogspot.ca/2013/01/for-us-judge-lewis-kaplan-show-trial_11.html) and mandamus petition here http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/2011-petition-writ-mandamus.pdf ) against the Ecuadorians and who was unanimously overturned on appeal (http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/2012-01-26-2nd-circuit-final-ruling.pdf) in an earlier phase of the case is permitting dozens of depositions to proceed before first ruling on basic pre-trial issues that will set the scope of the underlying claims.
Kaplans management of the case is leading to a massive waste of resources which is designed to benefit Chevron, the third-largest American company with gross revenue in 2012 of nearly $250 billion, said Humberto Piaguaje, the coordinator of the litigation for the rainforest communities and a leader of the Secoya indigenous group.
Chevron knows it cant defend itself on the merits, so it is trying to use its unlimited resources to try to crush the lawyers who have bravely defended our rights, he said. Chevrons goal is to get rid of the lawyers so we will be defenseless in the face of the companys contamination of our ancestral lands.
Kaplan has not ruled on counterclaims filed more than six months ago by a U.S. lawyer for the Ecuadorians, Steven R. Donziger, or on different counterclaims asserted against Chevron by Stratus, an environmental consulting firm. He also has yet to rule on whether Chevron can assert a claim of unjust enrichment against the Ecuadorians, and has failed to resolve two Chevron motions for summary judgment that the Ecuadorians say are premature given that discovery is just beginning.
Absent a settling of the issues raised
the parties cannot know what witnesses to depose, what additional discovery might be needed, and what experts would be necessary even though the expert deadline set by Kaplan already has passed, said the letter.
Chevrons intent is to leverage its huge advantage in money to bury the [Ecuadorian plaintiffs], Donziger and Stratus under wave after wave of motions and discovery manoeuvring to make it impossible for Defendants to mount a coherent defense, said the letter.
To underscore its point, the letter cited a recent comment by Chevron CEO John Watson to Forbes saying the case ends only when the plaintiffs lawyers give up. It also cited a comment by the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals that Chevron had bombard[ed] this Court with distracting and irrelevant documents during a recent appeal of certain issues in the case.
In January of last year, the Ecuador appellate court also blasted Chevron for trying to flood its chambers with duplicative and irrelevant filings and accused the company of some of the most unethical behavior it had seen in the history of the countrys judicial system.
In the Ecuador trial, which lasted eight years due in part to Chevrons delaying tactics, the oil giant was found to have discharged billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon when it operated in the country from 1964 to 1992 under the Texaco brand, decimating indigenous groups and causing an outbreak of cancer and other oil-related diseases. (For a summary of the evidence, see here (http://chevrontoxico.com/assets/docs/2012-01-evidence-summary.pdf) and view this video.
The company is now spending a whopping $400 million annually on legal costs to try to evade its obligation to pay the judgment, according to estimates from representatives of the communities in Ecuador who brought the lawsuit. This is probably the most money any company in history has spent defending itself on environmental claims, said Aaron Page, a U.S. lawyer for the Ecuadorians. The total legal cost for Chevron shareholders is likely approaching $2 billion and it is rising fast.
SKV represents the Ecuadorians Hugo Gerardo Camache and Javier Piaguaje, two of the 47 named plaintiffs in the underlying case. Keker represents Donziger, who lives in Manhattan. Donziger filed counterclaims accusing Chevron of fraud, extortion, and of mounting an espionage campaign (http://chevrontoxico.com/news-and-multimedia/2012/0315-chevron-using-espionage-against-lawyers) against him and his family.
The underlying environmental lawsuit was filed in 1993 in U.S. federal court before it was shifted to Ecuador in 2002 at Chevrons request. At the time, Chevron filed 14 sworn affidavits in U.S. court praising the fairness of Ecuadors judicial system.
For more information, please contact:
Karen Hinton
Phone: (at link)
Twitter: @ChevronPit
http://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/35294-Chevron-Using-60-Law-Firms-and-2-000-Legal-Personnel-To-Evade-Ecuador-Environmental-Liability-Company-Reports
Edited because embedded links weren't showing.
Catherina
(35,568 posts)Minute 4:28
There has been a growing trend of transnational corporations capitalizing on investment treaties to subvert the sovereignty of the countries in which they operate. The Transnational Institute recently documented that a small circle of corporate lawyers that some refer to as an "inner mafia" just 15 lawyers have decided 55% of all disputes receive up to $1,000 per hour per lawyer to sit on the panels.
Over the last 15 years these arbitrations have increased more than tenfold with 38 in 1996 and 450 in 2011. In over a third of those cases corporations have sued countries for over $100 million. Some of these arbiters are former board members of multinational corporations that have sued developing nations. They are agents of what writer Naomi Klein has dubbed "disaster capitalism," targeting countries in the Global South and capitalizing on nations in the midst of crisis. They sue governments when corporations believe that governments have treated them unfairly by adopting environmental protections or public health laws.
However, the Chevron panel is going even further and taking the unprecedented step of trying to use an investment treaty to nullify the ruling of a sovereign domestic court that Chevron delayed for years. What makes the attempt even more shameless is that Ecuador was not even party to the 19-year court case; the plaintiffs were the 30,000 indigenous and campesino people who are still suffering from the toxic consequences of Chevron's contamination in the Amazon.
Chevron is asking the panel to demand that Ecuador pays the $19 billion judgment as a punishment for not ruling in Chevron's favor. As an earlier Amazon Watch publication noted, "one of the wealthiest corporations on the planet with revenues of $240 billion in 2011 is seeking a taxpayer-funded bailout in Ecuador where the per capita income is $4,000 per annum. In other words, it wants the victims of its contamination to pay for the clean-up of their ancestral lands sort of like executing someone before a firing squad and sending their family an invoice for the bullets."
...
If Citizens United has given corporations an oversized voice, then corporate arbitration panels ensure that they are the only voice. In short, corporate arbitration panels are Citizens United on steroids, uprooting the executive, legislative, and in the case of Chevron even the judicial sovereignty that define an independent state.
...
http://amazonwatch.org/news/2013/0304-chevrons-kangaroo-court-citizens-united-on-steroids
03/01/2013| 01:37pm US/Eastern
By Mercedes Alvaro
QUITO, Ecuador--Ecuador's Foreign Ministry said Friday that a number of Socialist nations grouped in an organization known as ALBA will hold an April meeting in Ecuador to discuss strategies on how to contest lawsuits made by multinational corporations.
...
Ecuador's President Rafael Correa has called several times for Latin-American unity to avoid what he calls "abuses of the multinational corporations." He has charged that the corporations view Latin American countries as "colonies."
A meeting of the ALBA political council this week in Caracas called on governments in the region to show solidarity with Ecuador in its multibillion-dollar legal battle with Chevron Corp. (CVX) over environmental issues.
A report on Ecuador's state newswire Andes said that Venezuela's Vice President Nicolas Maduro has offered support to Ecuador in its legal battle with Chevron.
http://www.4-traders.com/CHEVRON-CORPORATION-12064/news/Chevron-Corporation-Ecuador-To-Host-ALBA-Meeting-On-Opposing-Corporate-Lawsuits-16375231/
Interesting...
Judi Lynn
(160,523 posts)They've fought with the ethics of a pack of hyenas against being held responsible by the victims.
Since they own more resources than the country they will be happy to grind Ecuador into the dirt just to be able to use it as an example for anyone in the future attempting to block their evil greed and its always destructive impact upon everyone in its way.
To treat people like human beings is far beyond from its interest range. Once in a take-no-prisoners corporation they are no longer human beings themselves.
newfie11
(8,159 posts)If the oil in Ecuador hasn't been nationalized yet, Correa needs to do it. Tell chevron where they can stick it.
sabrina 1
(62,325 posts)much harm, so much heartache to people all over the world, not to mention what they are doing to the environment, that is should be a matter of National Security in every country on the planet, to take over these criminal operations and Nationalize, Globally, all Energy Companies. They are worse than any invading army when they set up their criminal operations anywhere, INCLUDING here in the US. They now have way, way too much power which is truly a threat to the security of the planet.
Correa, or any leader in Latin America would be risking their own lives though, if they tried to do it alone. It needs to be a Global effort. The very fact that they have to worry about their lives shows how far this has been allowed to go. The Mafia looks like amateurs compared to these criminals.
And THIS is why they hate Chavez so much.
This was one of the best things Chavez did for Latin America. Created their own alliances to strengthen their power against the invasions of these Global Corporations.
naaman fletcher
(7,362 posts)It was one of the best things Chavez did. However the study posted yesterday by Judi Lynn suggests that what is really happening is a new round of exploitation of Latin America due to the colonial mindset.
newfie11
(8,159 posts)Yes you are right in that the oil companies have become the mafia. I am embarrassed to be an American.