Oleoducto Ecuatoriano, foto usada por FORTUNE
The
Ecuador ChevronTexaco saga continues and has no signs of resolution in the
short term. The legal action taken by a group of Ecuadorians against the oil
company has been deeply tainted by all kinds of irregularities and fraud: the legal
expert designated by the judge was working for the plaintiffs. The lawyers for
the plaintiffs wrote his report or significant portions of it. Even the
President of Ecuador and some of his staff have been involved in this grotesque
attempt to frame the oil company. And now, the oil company is accusing the
well-known law firm of Patton Boggs of helping the plaintiffs to cover up their
dirty work. A story published by FORTUNE says the following (see complete story
in http://features.blogs.fortune.cnn.com/2012/09/25/chevron-patton-boggs/?iid=SF_F_River
)
Chevron claims Patton Boggs tried to cover up a fraud
The
oil giant has subpoenaed the big DC firm concerning its role in a fraud-tainted
case.
By Roger Parloff
FORTUNE -- While everyone
is entitled to a lawyer to help him pursue his legal rights, no one is entitled
to a lawyer to help him complete a crime in progress.
In a hearing this morning
in a federal suit in New York, oil giant Chevron Corp. is accusing the
politically connected, 500-attorney law firm of Patton Boggs of having violated
that basic rule by assisting crooked plaintiffs lawyers who are attempting to
shake the company down. It's an extraordinary claim to level at any law firm,
let alone at an AmLaw 100 firm which is one of the leading lobbying and
government-relations shops in Washington, D.C. (Patton Boggs's election law
expert, Ben Ginsberg, is currently acting as national counsel to Mitt Romney's
presidential campaign. Ginsberg is not personally involved in the disputes that
are the subject of this article, however.)
Chevron's gripe arises
from Patton Boggs's involvement in the long-running environmental suit that was
filed against Chevron in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, in 2003 on behalf of Amazon rainforest
inhabitants. The suit claims that a subsidiary of Texaco, which was acquired by
Chevron in 2001, contaminated the rivers and wells the plaintiffs relied on for
sustenance by employing shoddy drilling practices between 1964 and 1990. In
February 2011 the plaintiffs won an $18.2 billion judgment in the case from an
Ecuadorian provincial court, which they are now seeking to enforce in the
courts of other countries, because Chevron has no assets in Ecuador.
The big fly in the
ointment is that Manhattan federal judge Lewis Kaplan ruled in July that,
judging from "uncontradicted evidence," the Lago Agrio plaintiffs'
case has been "unquestionably … tainted" by an elaborate fraud
committed by their lead U.S. lawyer Steven Donziger and his Ecuadorian
co-counsel Pablo Fajardo. (At least five other U.S. federal district judges
have also found "prima facie" evidence of fraud tainting the
plaintiffs' case—a more tentative finding—as has one federal appeals panel.
The tricky part for
Patton Boggs is that, since 2010, Donziger's and Fajardo's co-captain on the
case has been Patton Boggs partner James E. Tyrrell, Jr., the regional managing
partner for its New York and New Jersey offices and a member of its executive committee….”
**********
Other legal firms
originally hired by the plaintiffs to help them have withdrawn from the case. According
to FORTUNE: “Two American law firms retained by Donziger
[head of the plaintiff’s legal team] in February to handle this effort abruptly
withdrew from the assignment in March, after interviewing a Stratus official
about the facts of the case."I'm sorry it has come to this," one
attorney explained to Donziger in an email, "but I feel if we proceed I
may be compromising this firm's reputation and ethical stature and I cannot do
that.". In their opinion the case against ChevronTexaco had serious
ethical defects that would have made them accomplices, were they to take it.
This is a long and bitter battle. In this particular case
we are convinced that ChevronTexaco is right and that the Ecuadorian plaintiffs
and their legal hired guns led by Mr. Donziger are wrong. The main culprits of whatever environmental situation might exist today in the Ecuador oil areas is PetroEcuador, the state oil company. They have not been touched. Of course, that would not be "patriotic".
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