Chevron Turns To “Obscure,” “Kangaroo” Court To Save It From $19 Billion Judgment

With hundreds of millions of dollars frozen in Argentina and legal losses in both U.S. and Ecuador courts piling up, Chevron is turning to an “obscure,” “kangaroo” court renting office space in the bowels of The Hague to try and escape the $19 billion judgment, writes Amazon Watch’s Paul Paz y Mino in his latest blog:

“So what do you do if you're a massive corporate criminal that has lost in local and national courts and the court of public opinion, been rejected by the U.S. Supreme court, had your assets seized and frozen abroad, and stand teetering on the brink of losing several other suits costing you billions of dollars in assets after decades of telling your shareholders you have ZERO risk in the matter?

“Well, if you're Chevron you try to weasel your way out any way you can and look to anyone – no matter how removed from the matter – to declare you're the victim rather than the perpetrator. In this particular case, as we wrote about last year, Chevron has found an obscure private arbitration panel, acting under the mantle of the U.S.-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty, in an attempt to circumvent justice in Ecuador and threaten that country into interfering in the Lago Agrio case.”

The private arbitration panel that Paul writes about recently demanded that the Government of Ecuador stop the Ecuadorians from enforcing their $19 billion judgment against Chevron. Ecuador has rightly argued that it cannot interfere in its judiciary; that it would be a violation of the Constitution. Meanwhile, the Ecuadorians have filed lawsuits in Argentina, Canada and Brazil to try and seize Chevron’s assets in those countries. Courts in Argentina have frozen Chevron’s assets there, believed to be worth about $2 billion. Chevron has few assets in Ecuador.

The panel is composed of corporate lawyers, who have close ties to Chevron’s law firm, King & Spalding and is highly conflicted in that its members are allowed to serve on the panel, even though they are representing other corporations before another panel at the same time. See this blog here for more details.

Read Paul’s entire blog here and watch this video, made by Friends of the Earth.

The Ecuadorians have ignored this panel and will continue to do so, given that it has no jurisdiction in the enforcement of the $19 billion judgment that they received from a legitimate court in Ecuador for the environmental crimes of Chevron.


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Chevron Should Follow BP’s Lead

In its negotiations with the White House to fund a $20 billion escrow account, BP could have stuck to its legal guns and followed Chevron's example of thumbing its nose at victims of its environmental practices in Ecuador. Instead, BP distanced itself from Chevron's strategy of blaming anyone but itself for the extensive oil contamination it caused to Ecuador's rainforest.

We will see how BP handles liability issues going forward, but this is a step in the right direction.

Chevron should accept what the BP spill makes abundantly clear: profits over safety is not a business plan. In fact, it could put you out of business.

That is proving true for Chevron in Ecuador, where an independent court expert has determined that the company faces more than $27 billion in damages for illegally dumping billions of gallons of oil-related toxins directly into the Amazon from 1964-1990. Audits conducted by Chevron, as well as the company's own sampling results, overwhelmingly prove the company's culpability.

While the BP disaster was an accident, Chevron's dumping was done intentionally as part of a plan to cut costs.

In regard to Chevron's Ecuador liability, two other things have become abundantly clear:

• Had oil companies like Chevron been held accountable for what happened in Ecuador the likelihood of accidents like the one in the Gulf would have been drastically reduced. Incentives would be different. Companies would have been forced to invest in safety, because they would have known they could not externalize environmental damage to local inhabitants, as has been done in Ecuador and the Gulf.
  

• The $27 billion in damages for the Ecuador mess is beginning to sound modest considering the astounding scope of the toxins that Chevron has admitted to dumping in Ecuador. Chevron refers to the number as a "shakedown." But in light of the $60 billion (and growing) price tag of the BP liability and cleanup, $27 billion sounds like a bargain given that the contamination in Ecuador is far larger than the Gulf spill estimates.
  

How many more Ecuadors and Gulf of Mexicos do we need to suffer through before the oil industry is held accountable?

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