Take That Chevron: There's A First Amendment After All

Chevron took a severe punch yesterday in its home state of California when a judge there ruled to ditch the oil giant's subpoena against an environmental group that has been highly critical of the company concerning its massive contamination of the Ecuadorian rainforest. See Reuters story below.

"I must err on the side of protecting the First Amendment activity," wrote California Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins.

The subpoena request results from a Chevron lawsuit in a New York court, where the company is arguing that Amazon Watch and others, including Chevron's own shareholders, are part of a grand conspiracy to "extort" money from it by applying public pressure through protests, advocacy in front of elected officials and negative media coverage.

An Ecuador court issued an $19 billion damage award against Chevron in February 2011 and an appeals court upheld the verdict, but Chevron has refused to pay, leading the Ecuadorians to file lawsuits to seize company assets in Argentina, Canada, Brazil and the little that's left in Ecuador.

Memo to Chevron: The First Amendment is in the Bill of Rights.

Judge rejects Chevron subpoena of advocacy group in Ecuador case

SAN FRANCISCO | Wed Apr 3, 2013 7:57pm EDT
By Braden Reddall

(Reuters) - A U.S. judge has rejected efforts byChevron Corp to secure documents from a California environmental advocacy group in a fraud case related to a $19 billion award for rainforest pollution in Ecuador.

Magistrate Judge Nathanael Cousins on Wednesday quashed Chevron's subpoena for a deposition and documents from Amazon Watch, which the group's own lawyer described as the U.S. oil company's "sharpest critic."

The subpoena was related to a case scheduled to go to trial on October 15 in which Chevron accuses Ecuadorean residents, their lawyers and advisers of fraud in obtaining a multi-billion dollar judgment from a local court.

Cousins said he had to weigh the free speech rights of Amazon Watch under the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment against the possibility of Chevron uncovering evidence for its case.

"I must err on the side of protecting the First Amendment activity," he said in his ruling in San Francisco federal court, although he left open the possibility that Chevron could seek documents under a narrower scope.

The parties are racing to gather evidence ahead of a May 31 deadline for discovery, Chevron lawyer Ethan Dettmer said.

The start of the trial in October will come almost exactly two decades after Ecuadoreans first filed their case in New York against Texaco, which was bought by Chevron in 2001. Texaco spent years pushing for the case to be moved to Ecuador, which eventually happened a decade ago.

Texaco was accused of contaminating the jungle around Lago Agrio, Ecuador, from 1964 to 1992. Chevron says Texaco cleaned up all the waste pits for which it was responsible before turning the sites over to state-owned Petroecuador, which still operates there. The Ecuadorean court in Lago Agrio issued its judgment against Chevron in February 2011.

Chevron then sued the Ecuadoreans and their long-time legal adviser, Steven Donziger, in Manhattan federal court. Chevron accuses them of illegally pressuring the Ecuadorean court to render a judgment in their favor, making fraud and racketeering conspiracy claims under the U.S. Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Donziger and the Ecuadoreans deny they acted improperly.

On Wednesday, Dettmer argued for Chevron that Amazon Watch became part of the fraud by publicizing the Ecuadorean plaintiffs' arguments in an effort to put enough public pressure on Chevron to force the company to settle the case.

But Richard Herz, a lawyer for Amazon Watch, said Chevron had already amassed ample evidence with more than 100 subpoenas, 20 more depositions scheduled, on top of 16 days of deposition from Donziger himself along with his entire computer hard drive. "They have every scrap of paper that he's ever written," Herz said.

The fraud case is Chevron Corp v. Steven Donziger et al, U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11-0691. The related case over the Amazon Watch subpoena was in the Northern District of California, No. 13-mc-80038-CRB.

(Reporting by Braden Reddall in San Francisco. Editing by Andre Grenon)

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Chevron Can Solve Its Argentina Problem: Pay The Judgment

Chevron's head of operations in Argentina has complained to the Ecuadorians, who recently won a $19 billion judgment against the company for massive oil contamination, that future exploration and drilling is threatened in Argentina because of a local court's decision to freeze its assets.

Efe News Service quoted Miguel Galluccio, Chevron's guy in the South American country, warning that the freeze resulting directly from Chevron's refusal to pay the Ecuador judgment "is absolutely detrimental to Argentina and could have a negative effect on investment."

Ok, Miguel, then convince your company to pay the judgment. You've got the money. It's that simple. Problem solved.

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Third Chevron Spill In Utah Bigger Than Thought -- Why Are We Not Surprised

Chevron's third spill in Utah in as many years is much bigger than the oil giant indicated initially. Why are we not surprised?

Chevron always downplays the impact of its drilling and exploration practices on the environment and human health.

One expert, John Connor, has even testified that he has never found any evidence that Chevron's drilling has harmed anyone or anything EVER.

He's been paid at least $8 million for his testimony and expert opinion. Wonder if that had anything to do with it?

See this press release about his testimony.

And, see this recent article about the Utah spill.

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More Chevron Spies & Lies

This Huffington Post blog is the stuff of spy novels and would be hard to believe if it all hadn't been so well-documented.

In the blog, Karen Hinton offers up a compilation of some of the dirty tricks played by Chevron's private investigative firms that have been hired to discredit the $19 billion judgment against the company for oil contamination.

A short excerpt reads:

The Chevron Corporation has spied and -- perhaps is still spying -- on the Republic of Ecuador, fueling a fierce battle between the oil giant and President Rafael Correa, who is calling on other South American countries to hold Chevron accountable for the world's largest oil-related disaster in the Ecuadorian rainforest. 

Fearing the loss of an historic, long-running environmental lawsuit in the Ecuadorian rainforest in 2009, Chevron secretly videotaped the judge hearing the case - with a spy pen and spy watch - in an effort to derail the trial by entrapping him, government officials and indigenous community leaders in a faked bribery scandal. 

It goes without saying that if Chevron had been caught trying to secretly videotape a U.S. judge, it would be facing criminal charges.

Read the entire blog here.

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SEC Tries To Silence Chevron Shareholders

Not surprisingly, the Securities and Exchange Commission has rubber stamped Chevron's request to remove a shareholder resolution from consideration at its annual shareholders meeting that would have stripped John Watson of his Chairman's title and responsibilities. Watson currently is the CEO and Chairman.

The SEC decision makes it look like the corporate tool it is, and Chevron, well, the corporate thug readers of The Chevron Pit have come to know.

A growing number of shareholders are concerned about the way Chevron is handling the $19 billion Ecuador judgment for massive oil contamination facing the company and have proposed a resolution to hold top executives more accountable by splitting the role of Chair and CEO, as many other companies have done.  Last year, a similar resolution won the support of 38 percent of Chevron shareholders.

Today, though, the SEC big footed Chevron's request, depriving shareholders an opportunity to vote on the resolution again. The move is in keeping with SEC's weak oversight of corporate America in general and an attempt to silence shareholders.

It will, however, take more than the SEC to silence these shareholders, some of whom have been subpoenaed by Chevron in its desperate legal attacks in the U.S. to stop enforcement of the judgment.

Two other resolutions will be voted on by shareholders:  one to appoint an environmental expert to the board and the other to explain why Chevron has subpoenaed several shareholder groups, including Trillium Asset Management, along with several dozen environmentalists, law students and summer interns.

See this New York Times article by Gretchen Morgenson and a San Francisco Chronicle article by David Baker.

Expect to see shareholders out in full force at the May 29th meeting without the resolution, but resolute to hold Chevron accountable for its environmental crimes.

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Chevron Boxes Itself In With SEC Move

Chevron's decision to ask the SEC to allow it to dropkick shareholder resolutions calling for the duties of Chairman and CEO to be split -- essentially demoting current Chair and CEO John Watson -- has boxed the oil giant into a public relations defeat.

It's a  lose-lose proposition for the multi-national corporation.

The shareholders are concerned about the way Watson and other Chevron executives have handled the $19 billion judgment against the company for massive oil contamination in the Ecuadorian rainforest. Watson and his 2,000 lawyers and legal assistants are spending hundreds of millions of dollars working on a legal attack to stop enforcement of the judgment.

The contamination is obvious. Everyone agrees Chevron's predecessor Texaco put it there. The people suffering are impoverished indigenous tribes and farmers who brought the original lawsuit 20 years ago. As the years have passed, Chevron has suffered from negative publicity casting it as an oil company concerned only about profits.

A growing number of shareholders are saying enough is enough.

Instead of finding a way out of the environmental nightmare, Chevron digs itself deeper into a hole with its SEC request to trounce on its shareholders, by nixing their resolutions and even subpoenaing them in its legal battles.

David Baker in today's San Francisco Chronicle describes the situation, and it's clear from his article that if the SEC rules in Chevron's favor, it will make the company look like the corporate thug that it is. Plus, it won't stop the shareholders from protesting at their annual meeting.

And, if the SEC doesn't, then the shareholders can once again introduce their resolutions and, likely, increase their vote tally, as they have done year after year.

Smart move, Chevron.

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What Happens When Big Oil Freaks Out

Chevron Spending $400 Million A Year On Ecuador Case, Subsidized By U.S Government?

Since 2011, when an Ecuadorian court found Chevron guilty of widespread contamination of the Amazon rain forest and ordered the oil giant to pay $19 billion in damages, Chevron has been spending around $400 million annually on 2,000 legal experts from 60 law firms to evade paying the judgment, according to a recent court filing.

But, for all the money and all the lawyers, Chevron is facing enforcement actions in four countries -- Ecuador, Canada, Argentina, and Brazil – where the Ecuadorians could seize their billions from Chevron’s assets. And, Chevron continues to lose in U.S. courts on the merits. See here.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports today that Chevron has received $2.6 billion in federal tax-free bonds to expand a refinery in Mississippi. The New York Times said Chevron has received more than any U.S.-based corporation and described it as "sweetheart rates for corporations."

What this means is the U.S. federal government is subsidizing Chevron's legal bills as a result of its misconduct in Ecuador, not to mention litigation and accusations Chevron has been defending in Brazil, California, Angola, Nigeria and other places across the globe. See here. 

In a desperate attempt to stop enforcement of the $19 billion judgment, Chevron has accused the Ecuadorian villagers and their lawyers for “fraud” and sued them in about 20 different U.S. court jurisdictions, filing hundreds of legal motions and millions of pages of discovery documents and taking over 40 depositions from experts and consultants -- all designed to distract from the 16 billion gallons of toxic production water it dumped into the Ecuadorian rainforest and the 900 unlined pits Chevron built to store permanently pure crude oil. 

For more details, read this press release.

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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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Telling The Truth About Chevron in Ecuador

It's no conspiracy, says Paul Paz y Miño of Amazon Watch in his blog about the subpoena Chevron served on Amazon Watch, one of the most effective environmental advocacy organizations in the country.

It's truth telling, and, last time we checked, that wasn't against the law.


Chevron, though, could care less, writes Paz y Miño.


"Not only is this invasive subpoena request a flagrant attack on our first-amendment rights, it is also an attempt at miring our organization in a protected and tangential lawsuit, designed to burden our resources and distract us from our goal: justice in the Amazon."


Amazon Watch, dedicated to helping communities in the Amazon region protect their lands, has been an outspoken defender of the Ecuadorians who recently won a $19 billion judgment against Chevron for massive contamination in the rainforest. Because Chevron has refused to pay the judgment, the Ecuadorians have filed lawsuits in Canada, Brazil and Argentina to freeze and seize Chevron's assets there. See here. (Chevron has few assets in Ecuador.)


In turn, Chevron has filed lawsuits in the United States to stop enforcement of the judgment. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals and the U.S. Supreme Court put a stop to that, but another lawsuit seeks to show that the Ecuadorians, their lawyers and supporters "conspired" through a "racketeering" campaign to force Chevron to pay a settlement.


In that effort, Chevron has intimidated and harassed hundreds of people, including its own shareholders, who favor Chevron being held accountable for its misconduct in Ecuador.
Subpoenaed for documents or depositions include environmentalist advocates, like the people who work for Amazon Watch, law students who spent a summer in Ecuador working on the case, others who had little to do with the litigation and even shareholders, an action that drew criticism recently from a New York Times business columnist.


Paz y Miño, though, hits the nail on the head when he calls Chevron's "conspiracy" theories nothing more than what other environmental groups did when Exxon spilled oil in Alaska and BP on the U.S. Gulf Coast; what consumer groups and advocates for homeowners did when banks ripped off home buyers with predatory loans and then ripped them off again with illegal foreclosures; what gun control advocates are doing now to stop the killing of innocent people:  they are exercising their First Amendment rights, telling the truth about how Chevron's intentional contamination destroyed what was once a pristine rainforest.


"What we are witnessing now is the last chapter of a 50-year campaign of human rights abuses by Chevron. And if they are successful in their desperate subpoena of hundreds of thousands of Amazon Watch documents, what they will find, ironically, is not that AW has been part of any alleged conspiracy, but rather nothing more than the spirit, the resolve, the compassion, and the intellect that we have brought to telling the truth about what Chevron did in Ecuador, and that in turn has helped bring the company to its knees."


Click here for the entire blog.


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For U.S. Judge Lewis Kaplan, The Show Trial Must Go On

For a real stinker in the federal judiciary, look no further than how New York federal judge Lewis A. Kaplan is desperately trying to protect Chevron from having to pay its $19 billion environmental liability in Ecuador.  Once again, Kaplan is trying to act as the world’s judicial police from his Manhattan courtroom.



You might remember that Kaplan shocked the legal community in 2011 when he issued an unprecedented “global injunction” that purported to bar Ecuadorian villagers from enforcing an Ecuadorian judgment obtained under Ecuadorian law in any country in the world.



A few months later, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in New York sharply rebuked Kaplan, vacated his injunction as utterly contrary to the law, and told him in no uncertain terms that he has no business trying to dictate to judges in other countries whether they should or should not enforce a judgment from another country.



After a short pause, Kaplan apparently is now open again for Chevron’s business.



Kaplan recently issued a series of orders designed to bolster Chevron’s ailing legal positions in the case as he readies a slightly different version of the “show trial” that the Second Circuit told him he couldn’t have.  But like any show trial, a peek under the covers reveals the intellectual dishonesty and zealotry behind a process clearly designed to help Chevron evade accountability for its sordid record of toxic dumping.



While the Ecuadorians have struggled mightily for two decades to hold Chevron accountable for the discharge of more than 16billion gallons of cancer-causing oil sludge into rainforest waterways, Kaplan has openly mocked the indigenous villagers in court.  He called their case a “giant game” and asserted that their lawyers were trying to make enough money to be the “next big thing in fixing the balance of payments deficit” of the United States. 



For a summary of the shocking extent of Kaplan’s smears and attacks in the case up to the summer of 2011, read this petition.

What has happened since is even more alarming to those who care about the integrity of our judicial system, particularly in cases where giant corporations try to steamroll their way to victory not on the merits but through procedural gamesmanship and intimidation. Kaplan’s conduct is an embarrassing demonstration of how our courts can be used as a "safe harbor" by entities that want to drown the opposition in paper and “gotcha” maneuvers.  We note this is happening when judges in other countries – including Canada, Brazil, and Argentina -- are starting to preside over enforcement proceedings related to the Ecuador judgment necessitated by Chevron’s refusal to pay what it owes.



Kaplan recently quashed 24 of the 27 third-party subpoenas issued by the Ecuadorians to gather additional evidence proving that the judgment in Ecuador was based on overwhelming scientific evidence, not “fraud” as the oil giant alleges in its trumped-up counter-attacks.   Kaplan quashed these subpoenas without as much as a hearing only six days after Chevron filed a perfunctory four-page motion.  In the meantime, he has done nothing to stop Chevron from serving 102 subpoenas on almost everybody connected to the Ecuadorians -- including their own lawyers, shareholders, journalists, law students, college interns and environmentalists who have had little to do with the litigation. See here.



Kaplan recently allowed Chevron to proceed with 31 additional subpoenas against third parties all but identical to the ones issued by the Ecuadorians that he quashed.  This happened despite a New York Times columnist and report questioning whether Chevron is using Kaplan’s court to abuse the discovery process to intimidate its own shareholders into silence.  (Canadian securities lawyer Graham Erion recently issued a chilling report documenting the company’s many misleading statements about the Ecuador case, which has created a furor in the shareholder community.)



What was Kaplan’s stated reason to allow Chevron massive unfettered discovery while denying all but the most limited discovery to the Ecuadorians?  He ruled it would be “oppressive” for Chevron, the world’s third-largest oil company with annual revenues of roughly $250 billion, to have to litigate each of the subpoenas in different federal courts consistent with normal litigation practice.  Kaplan could cite no legal support for this wildly unbalanced approach.  He ignored the fact that in addition to its subpoenas, Chevron has of its own accord chosen to initiate dozens of highly burdensome lawsuits seeking discovery in at least 18 different federal courts, without doubt one of the most oppressive legal strategies ever undertaken.



Some of Kaplan's decisions of late reflect his deep-seated bias and often make a mockery of the authority of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, New York’s highest court. Consider:



**Chevron claims it is using the civil RICO and fraud case to seek “emergency relief” to block enforcement of the Ecuador judgment in countries outside the U.S. – precisely the relief the Second Circuit ruled that Chevron was barred from seeking.  Kaplan recently issued a stunning 17-page ruling where he insisted that the fraud case allows him to make findings in the context of pre-trial motions to help Chevron block the enforcement actions overseas.

**For almost two years now, Chevron has vociferously championed the notion that the Ecuador lawsuit is nothing more than “sham litigation” from beginning to end.  Just days ago, Chevron suddenly dropped that allegation at the request of Kaplan.  Why?  Because Kaplan decided he didn’t want the Ecuadorians to take discovery from Chevron’s own scientists that would prove the company itself knew the litigation was based on scientific evidence. Kaplan then barred the Ecuadorians from presenting a defense based on Chevron’s contamination in Ecuador.


** In a move straight out of Kafka, Kaplan is forcing the Ecuadorians to mount defenses they don’t want to use just so he can rule against them and advance Chevron’s case in the process. The denial of these technical defenses (such as res judicata) will afford Kaplan the opportunity to further disparage Ecuador’s judicial system in the context of pre-trial motions, again without so much as an evidentiary hearing.  Chevron in foreign courts to try to convince judges there that the issues were already “decided”. Read this brief for details.



** Kaplan openly disobeys higher courts when it suits his objectives.  In refusing to grant a motion that the “racketeering” case be dismissed against the Ecuadorians, Kaplan chose to disregard the binding authority of the Second Circuit.  He suggested that the appellate judges were wrong to decide as they did in light of an older case from an intermediate level New York state court. He must be the only trial judge in the country who openly seeks to “overrule” the appellate court that supervises him.

**Kaplan also takes great pains to avoid appellate scrutiny of his obvious insubordination.  Since being reversed on the global injunction, Kaplan has carefully crafted his orders to try to make them immune to appeal.  Just last week, the Ecuadorians asked Kaplan to certify for appeal his denial of their motion to dismiss the case for lack of a valid legal claim.  Kaplan refused even though such an appeal could definitively end the case for the Ecuadorians (who own the judgment), leaving only small damages claims against their U.S. counsel.  Since such an appeal would potentially eliminate the raison d’etre of the entire show trial exercise, Kaplan denied it.



**Kaplan regularly suggests that he has issued “factual findings” even though: (1) he has never held so much as an evidentiary hearing; (2) he has only ruled on pre-trial motions disposed as “matters of law,” for which facts are not supposed to be weighed or determined; and (3) he has only reached his findings using procedural tricks which allow him to falsely assert that Chevron’s evidence is “uncontested”.  Of course, the Ecuadorians have vigorously disputed every aspect of Chevron’s make-believe case.  Kaplan justifies his “uncontested” claim by way of finding that the Ecuadorians have “waived” this and that defense, often using unreasonably short deadlines or other tricks.   Chevron, too, uses these so-called “uncontested findings” in foreign courts to argue the issues are settled. 



** Kaplan delights in Chevron’s vexatious litigation practices.  It is estimated that the company has spent well over $1 billion defending the case, or about 20 times more than the paltry $40 million it spent on its woefully inadequate and fraudulent remediation in Ecuador. In addition to allowing the company to issue a massive number of subpoenas, Kaplan allowed Chevron to seek 58 broad categories of documents encompassing millions of pages of material from active litigation counsel at the Patton Boggs law firm. 



Targeting law firms with broadly worded subpoenas is part of the Chevron strategy to scare away professionals from helping the victims of the company’s human rights abuses.

That’s the “service” the oil giant is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to buy from Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, which has at least 60 lawyers working on the case.  In blatant violation of the First Amendment, GDC has dispatched a legal goon squad to sue and subpoena anybody sympathetic to the Ecuadorians – including Google and Yahoo.

Kaplan also has a shameful history of denying due process to Steven Donziger, a long-time human rights lawyer for the Ecuadorians who lives in Manhattan.  Kaplan’s personal vendetta against Donziger, a fellow Harvard Law alum who has worked for almost two decades on the case, is palpable. The great judge seems to regard Donziger’s decision to forego a career in corporate law and work out of his home as some sort of personal affront.  He has called Donziger a “field general” and other nice names, and is certain to deny Donziger’s counterclaims against Chevron which document its history in Ecuador of using lies, bribery, intimidation, and espionage to sabotage the legal case.



In early 2011, Kaplan gave Donziger only eight days to hire a lawyer, read and digest Chevron’s 148-page “fraud” complaint (with 589 exhibits), and file an opposition before he declared the record “closed” and three weeks later entered his illegal injunction purporting to block enforcement of the Ecuador judgment.   Donziger filed a powerful opposition to Chevron within days and submitted it two weeks before Kaplan ruled.  Kaplan refused to consider the opposition.  Waving a magic wand like this is how Kaplan ensures inconvenient facts do not infect the script.



(See here for an earlier brief Donziger filed to successfully appeal Kaplan’s violation of his due process rights and here for a summary of the overwhelming scientific evidence relied on by the Ecuador court to find Chevron liable.)



As noted, Kaplan suffered a humiliating rebuke last year when the Second Circuit unanimously overturned his unprecedented injunction.  Kaplan’s injunction had prompted harsh criticism from international jurists and numerous U.S. scholars who concluded his bizarre notion of U.S. judicial policing would create chaos in the world’s courts and undermine our system of international law. See here and here.  In 2012, Chevron hired the dean of the U.S. Supreme Court bar, Ted Olson, to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to rescue the Kaplan proceeding. The highest court took one look at Chevron’s tale and sent Olson packing.   Its reaction is similar to that from the highest appellate court in Ecuador, which explicitly dismissed Chevron’s “fraud” claims with the note that they “go nowhere without a good dose of imagination.”


At oral argument over the illegal injunction, John Keker (who represents Donziger) asserted that Kaplan was creating a show trial where the Ecuadorian villagers and Donziger would be “tethered to a stake like a goat.”   Chevron’s lawyer, self-described “mob prosecutor” Randy Mastro, was laughed at by most of the gallery when he couldn’t answer the most basic questions about the absence of legal authority for Kaplan’s maneuver.   Mastro then got slammed by an Oregon federal judge for committing ethical violations on Chevron's behalf.



Before the Second Circuit intervened, Kaplan had scheduled an unusual court proceeding for November 2011 where he alone was going to judge whether Ecuador’s entire judicial system was up to international standards.

 (This is the same system where, by the way, Chevron has won many civil cases against Ecuador's state-owned oil company through the years)

After that plan got deep-sixed, Kaplan came up with a different way to try to do the same thing.  He decreed there would be a trial against the Ecuadorians and their counsel this October on Chevron’s “racketeering” charges.   That is, a trial about the trial that already occurred in the courts in Ecuador where Chevron wanted the entire proceeding to take place after it was shifted there on Chevron’s request from New York’s courts – the same court where Kaplan now sits.

If that gives you a headache, you are not alone.



And in case the Ecuadorians might mount a proper opposition in this short time period, Kaplan is doing just about everything in his power to squelch that possibility.  He quashes subpoenas and requires the Ecuadorians to respond to Chevron’s voluminous “summary judgment” motions that in normal cases should be brought near the end of the discovery process, not at the beginning.

A giant game indeed.

It is painfully obvious that Kaplan intends to give Chevron as many of the rulings and “findings” that it wants while the charade continues.  It is equally obvious that his rulings will be of little use to the company in foreign courts, which to this point have been more than happy to thumb their noses at a U.S. judge who appears to be a shining international example of judging gone awry.

Inside Chevron, hope springs eternal.

**



To understand more about how the rainforest communities in Ecuador have suffered at Chevron’s hands, see this photo spread and the gripping personal testimonies put together by longtime Reuters photographer Lou Dematteis and journalist Joan Kruckewitt, as published by the Huffington Post; this video prepared by the plaintiffs that explains the case; and this report from 60 Minutes where Chevron lawyer states that no court in the world should hear the claims of the Ecuadorian villagers.

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