Chevron fined $8 billion in Ecuador
QUITO, Ecuador - An Ecuadoran judge ruled Monday that Chevron Corp. was responsible for oil contamination in a wide swath of Ecuador's northern jungle. The plaintiffs' attorney says the company was fined $8 billion.
QUITO, Ecuador - An Ecuadoran judge ruled Monday that Chevron Corp. was responsible for oil contamination in a wide swath of Ecuador's northern jungle. The plaintiffs' attorney says the company was fined $8 billion.
Chevron confirmed the ruling but not the amount of the fine. The company said in a statement that it would appeal and called the judge's decision "illegitimate and unenforceable."
The high-profile case, fraught with intrigue, corporate espionage, and geopolitics, had been winding its way through U.S. and Ecuadoran courts for 17 years.
Chevron invested tens of millions of dollars in its legal defense, seeking relief in a half-dozen U.S. federal courts and requesting binding arbitration in an international tribunal in the Netherlands.
Just last week, a U.S. federal judge in New York took the unusual step of preemptively blocking any judgment for at least 28 days after concluding that attempts to collect assets could seriously disrupt the business of a company vital to the global economy. He took the action at the request of Chevron's lawyers.
The plaintiffs team for years was financed by the Philadelphia law firm of Kohn, Swift & Graf, which spent $7 million on the case and also assisted in settlement attempts in the United States. Name partner Joseph Kohn pulled out of the case in late 2009, later accusing the lawyers in Ecuador of potentially improper conduct.
The ruling was issued by Judge Nicolas Zambrano from a ramshackle courthouse in the provincial city of Lago Agrio. It specifies damages for "the cleanup of soil, subterranean water, health, indigenous communities," the plaintiffs' lead lawyer, Pablo Fajardo, said.
The suit was originally filed in a New York federal court in 1993 against Texaco and was refiled in Ecuador after Chevron bought the company in 2001. It sought damages on behalf of 30,000 people, including indigenous groups, for environmental contamination and illnesses that allegedly resulted from Texaco's operation of an oil consortium from 1972 to 1990.