Villagers Plan to Seize Chevron's $106M Arbitral Award
Villagers Plan to Seize Chevron's $106M Arbitral Award
Wednesday, 1 October 2014, 12:41 pm
Press Release: Hinton Communications
Indigenous Villagers Plan to Seize Chevron's $106 Million Arbitral Award in Ecuador
QUITO, ECUADOR, Sep. 30 /CSRwire/ - In what could be a huge boost to their campaign to force Chevron to comply with a $9.5 billion environmental judgment in Ecuador, rainforest villagers plan to enforce a court order directing them to take possession of a $106 million arbitral award won recently by the oil giant from Ecuador’s government in a case that recently became final in Dutch courts.
The planned seizure of Chevron’s arbitral award – part of a global effort by the villagers to step up their enforcement of the judgment -- is an example of the oil company’s rising business and legal risk related to its environmental contamination in Ecuador’s rainforest, said Pablo Fajardo, the lead lawyer for the communities that hold the judgment.
After an eight-year trial, an Ecuador court in 2011 found that Chevron had deliberately dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the rainforest when it operated hundreds of well sites from 1964 to 1992. The dumping caused a wave of cancers and other environmental problems that have decimated indigenous groups, according to the court decision.
Locals call the disaster the “Chernobyl of the Amazon” and have vowed to fight Chevron until the entire judgment is collected.
“The Ecuadorian victims of Chevron’s toxic dumping have a lawful right to obtain this arbitral award and other company assets until their judgment is fully satisfied,” said Fajardo. “Our people are suffering from a humanitarian crisis and many lives are at stake because Chevron -- unlike BP in the United States -- refuses to pay to clean up its pollution.”
The $106 million figure comes from the amount of an arbitral award that Chevron won from Ecuador under the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty in an unrelated series of commercial disputes dating to the early 1990s between the American company and Ecuador’s state-owned oil company, Petroecuador. A Dutch court last week denied Ecuador’s last appeal of the award, rendering the arbitral decision final.
More:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1410/S00008/villagers-plan-to-seize-chevrons-106m-arbitral-award.htm