Stop the presses!
Even though he has characterized
every aspect of Ecuador -- its people, culture, government and courts -- as
corrupt, dysfunctional or a joke, U.S. Judge Lewis Kaplan finally ruled in
favor of a motion filed by a group of Ecuadorians and their U.S. legal adviser.
The Ecuadorians may depose the oil
giant's CEO and Chair, John Watson.
It is rare that a CEO &
Chairman of the Board is required to sit for a deposition, which will take
place this month. Watson, though, has been intimately involved in the
20-year-old lawsuit, originally filed against Texaco in the U.S. but later
re-filed in Ecuador against Chevron for massive oil contamination of the Amazon
rainforest. Chevron purchased Texaco in 2001. In 2011, an Ecuador court
delivered a $19 billion judgment against Chevron.
As the architect of the plan to
purchase Texaco, Watson knew about Texaco's admission that it had dumped
16 billion gallons of toxic production water into the Ecuador rainforest's
waterways. He knew about the 900 unlined pits that Texaco built to store pure
crude. He knew about the internal audits Texaco conducted that showed
massive contamination. Yet, he pushed the merger and, as a
result, inherited the largest environmental lawsuit in the world's history
and urged a trial in Ecuador, only later to cry foul when he, his lawyers
and his private investigative firm, Kroll, failed to undermine
the Ecuadorian judicial system.
Having lost in Ecuador, Watson and
his 2,000 lawyers and legal assistants turned to the U.S. and found in Lewis
Kaplan a federal judge only happy to take their spurious charges seriously. See
this Chevron Pit for more background on
Kaplan's bias against the Ecuadorians.
Meanwhile, the Ecuadorians are
focusing their resources and energy where it matters: in countries where
Chevron has assets. They have filed lawsuits in Argentina, Canada, Brazil and
Ecuador to seize assets as payment for the judgment Chevron refuses to acknowledge.
Currently, $2 billion has been frozen in Argentina.
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