Legal News

Chevron Lawyers Indicted in Connection with Ecuador Case

By Dan Slater

Indigenous people from around 40 different ethnic groups protest in front of Lago Agrio’s Supreme Court, western Ecuador, July 3, 2007, demanding faster results in the suit they filed in 2003 against Texaco. (AP/Eduardo Valenzuela).

In July we told you about some jungle litigation in Ecuador that takes us, according to an AmLaw report, “20 miles south of the jungle territory patrolled by Colombian leftist guerrillas” to the “ramshackle” city of Lago Agrio. Some 30,000 residents of Ecuador’s Amazon Basin, known collectively as the Amazon Defense Coalition, hopes to hold Chevron accountable for alleged environmental abuses committed by Texaco, which Chevron bought in 2001.

On Friday, reports AmLaw, Chevron’s legal worries in Ecuador grew when in-house lawyer Ricardo Reis Veiga and outside counsel Rodrigo Perez Pallares were accused of being part of a conspiracy to fraudulently certify that Texaco had completed the cleanup of more than 100 mines in the Ecuadorean rainforest in the 1990s. The government released Chevron from liability on the basis of those certifications.

“The politically motivated indictments mark a renewal of the Ecuadorean state’s attempts to disavow contractual obligations owed to Chevron from contracts signed in 1995 and 1998,” Chevron said in a statement. “Recent events in Ecuador leave no doubt that there is improper collaboration between the government and plaintiffs lawyers [in the civil case]. ”

A lawyer for the Republic of Ecuador, C. MacNeil Mitchell of Winston & Strawn, told The Am Law Daily that the government is not involved in the environmental tort litigation — and that Chevron’s attempt to link the indictments to the environmental suit is part of the company’s strategy to discredit the Ecuadorean courts.

“Chevron isn’t stupid,” said Mitchell. “We may look at individual things they do and say, ‘That doesn’t make sense.’ But they have an overall game plan. They know there’s going to be a big judgment against them in Ecuador. They want to avoid paying it. One way to do that is by saying the Ecuadorean system is corrupt and their rights were trampled.”

New York lawyer Stephen Donziger and Philadelphia plaintiffs firm Kohn Swift & Graf are handling the litigation for the ADC. A Jones Day team led by Thomas Cullen Jr. is repping Chevron in Ecuador.

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on September 15, 2008 (boomark / email).