Chevron foes suffer setback
The Supreme Court won’t hear an Ecuador case appeal.
SAN FRANCISCO — A decadeslong lawsuit to make Chevron Corp. pay for cleaning up oil field pollution in Ecuador suffered another blow Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal in the case, which has been closely watched worldwide.
The justices let stand a 2016 U.S. District Court ruling that a $19 billion judgment against Chevron in an Ecuadorean court in 2011 was the result of an elaborate fraud orchestrated by an American attorney, Steven Donziger.
Although Ecuador’s highest court later cut that amount to $9.5 billion, Chevron vowed not to pay. Instead, Chevron accused Donziger of bribing an Ecuadoran judge and ghostwriting the judgment against the company.
“The facts of the Ecuadorean judicial extortion scheme and the illegality of the plaintiffs’ lawyer misconduct have been finally and conclusively affirmed by the legal system of the United States,” R. Hewitt Pate, Chevron’s general counsel, said in an email. “Today’s decision is an important step toward bringing this illegal scheme to a final conclusion.”
The Supreme Court’s action appears to end one tumultuous chapter in the fight — but does not stop the fight itself. Although further legal action in the U.S. now seems unlikely, Ecuadorans who want Chevron to fund cleanup efforts in a corner of the Amazon rainforest are also pursuing the company in Canada.
Chevron’s opponents on Monday accused the U.S. Supreme Court of acting like “biased referees” in a ballgame, allowing an American company off the hook for misdeeds aboard. They maintain that Chevron, based in San Ramon, Calif., bribed a witness and forged evidence.
“Ultimately, Chevron will be forced by other jurisdictions to pay every last dollar of the judgment imposed on it for criminal behavior in Ecuador,” read a statement Monday from the Amazon Defense Coalition, an organization that represents villagers and farmers living near Ecuador’s oil fields.
The lawsuit’s roots stretch back decades.
Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001, drilled for oil in Ecuador from 1964 to 1992, working alongside the state-owned oil company Petroecuador. Chevron insists that Texaco fulfilled all of its cleanup obligations when it left the country. Any remaining pollution, according to Chevron, is Petroecuador’s responsibility.
The lawsuit, based in the Ecuadorean town of Lago Agrio, became an international cause célèbre and the subject of a 2009 documentary film, “Crude.” But the film, which profiled Donziger and his legal team, became the key to Chevron’s defense. One scene showed the team working with a court-appointed technical expert, Richard Cabrera, who was supposed to be neutral.