User:Chevron justinh/sandbox

Environmental damage in Ecuador

Proposed Copy: Texaco Petroleum Company (TexPet) and Gulf Oil Company began operating in the Oriente region of Ecuador in 1964 as a consortium. In 1976, Ecuador’s state-owned oil company, Petroecuador, became the majority owner of the consortium and in 1992 took 100% ownership. Petroecuador has since continued to operate and expand oil operations in the former consortium region.

Between 1990 and 1995, TexPet and the Government of Ecuador reached a series of agreements regarding environmental remediation of the area. In 1995, TexPet, the Ecuadorean government and Petroecuador signed a settlement agreement under which TexPet ultimately spent 3 years and $40 million remediating sites in the Oriente region and in 1998 the parties signed a final settlement agreement releasing TexPet from liability arising from the consortium’s activities. In 1993 plaintiffs’ attorneys in the United States filed a lawsuit against Texaco in federal district court in New York on behalf of residents of the Oriente. The action was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds. In 2003, plaintiffs, represented by New York attorney Steven Donziger, filed a new lawsuit against Chevron in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. During the intervening years, Chevron had merged with Texaco. While the case in New York was a class action lawsuit claiming personal injury, the plaintiffs in the case filed against Chevron in Ecuador were alleging that Chevron was responsible for environmental and health damage in the Country’s Oriente region. In 2011, an Ecuadorean judge awarded the plaintiffs $18 billion (later revised to $19 billion on appeal), a judgment currently under appeal to the Ecuadorean National Court of Justice. Since Chevron Corporation has no substantive assets in Ecuador, plaintiffs have filed actions to enforce the judgment against Chevron Corporation subsidiaries in Brazil, Argentina and Canada, all of which are currently unresolved. In May, 2013, Justice David Brown of the Ontario Superior Court stayed the action, but ruled that the Canadian courts have no jurisdiction to enforce the controversial award handed down by an Ecuadorian court against Chevron. In June, 2013, Argentina's Supreme Court revoked an embargo on the assets and future income of Chevron's Argentina subsidiary.

During discovery proceedings brought by Chevron in the United States, the company was granted access to plaintiffs’ documents and movie outtakes from Crude, a movie about the case produced with the cooperation of the plaintiffs. Within that material, Chevron claims that it found evidence that the company is using to show that the plaintiffs corrupted legal proceedings by intimidating judges, colluding with scientific experts and ghostwriting official reports as well as the judgment itself.

In 2011, Chevron filed a lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the plaintiffs, their attorneys, environmental consultants and others connected to the case under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. In July 2012, the U.S federal judge hearing the RICO lawsuit found that an environmental report used in the Ecuador trial as well as the judgment itself was “tainted by fraud” due to the secret participation of the plaintiffs in their creation.

Representatives for the original Ecuadorean plaintiffs call the RICO allegations fraudulent and a sideshow and claim that the federal judge overseeing the case is biased. Both sides have accused each other of bribing various witnesses. In April 2013, Stratus Consulting, the environmental consultants sued by Chevron, settled after Stratus conceded that it had been misled by Steven Donziger and said that it was disavowing its research into pollution in Ecuador. The same month, Burford Capital, a litigation finance firm that had at one point funded the lawsuit against Chevron, renounced its interest in any award against Chevron saying that Burford had been deceived into investing in the case by lawyers for the Ecuadoreans from the Patton Boggs law firm. Representatives for the Ecuadoreans have repeatedly described these events as the result of an attempt by Chevron to intimidate them. The RICO lawsuit is scheduled to go to trial in October 2013.

In addition to the various court proceedings in the United States and abroad, the Lago Agrio judgment is also being contested in arbitral proceedings under the United States-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty (BIT Arbitration), where the panel has twice issued an interim award instructing the Republic of Ecuador to "take all measures necessary to suspend or cause to be suspended the enforcement and recognition within and without Ecuador.”

Chevron justinh (talk) 18:07, 19 June 2013 (UTC)

Environmental damage in Ecuador

Proposed Copy: Since 1993, Chevron has been involved in a wide-ranging and complex legal dispute surrounding pollution in Ecuador allegedly caused by the company’s activities in the county from 1964 to 1992. Beginning in 2011, Ecuadorean courts issued a series of rulings in the case that eventually resulted in a $19 billion judgment against Chevron. That judgment has not yet been enforced and the case continues to be litigated in Brazil, Argentina and Canada and in arbitral proceedings under the United States-Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty.

Chevron claims that it properly remediated its sites in Ecuador, that the case against it is based on a fraud perpetrated by plaintiffs’ attorneys, and that the pollution is the responsibility of Ecuador’s state owned oil company, Petroecuador. Chevron has sued the plaintiffs, their attorneys and others in New York federal court under the RICO statute; a trial on that matter is scheduled for October 2013. Chevron justinh (talk) 17:18, 26 June 2013 (UTC)