Chevron defeats the Greens with their own hubris

While this result is a good one for truth and honesty, is there going to be any follow up prosecutions for fraudulent behaviour that Green groups exhibited during this case?
If the follow up does not happen then they will try again against someone else and hope their bullying is not challenged. Pain is the most effective deterrent. The more pain, the more effective the deterrent.

Amen to this. Green is garbage.

From Wall Street Journal…

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Monday found that New York lawyer Steven Donziger and his litigation team engaged in coercion, bribery, money laundering and other criminal conduct in their effort to obtain a multibillion dollar pollution judgment in Ecuador against Chevron Corp.

Would it be naive to expect that a federal indictment might be appropriately forthcoming?

What is even better is they may also be taking down the law firm of Patton Boggs who lobbys for international customers. (I have another comment on the history of that firm)
Patton Boggs is the law firm that started the new improved lobbying industry in 1960s according to their website a decade ago.
Now they sy:

When Thomas Hale Boggs Jr. joined Patton Boggs, the year was 1966, Lyndon B. Johnson was president, and there were — by Boggs’s estimate — fewer than 100 people in Washington who called themselves lobbyists. The firm was a fledgling five-man operation trying to make its mark in lobbying, which at the time was considered an up-and-coming practice area. ¶A lot has changed. Today, Patton Boggs is the most lucrative lobby shop in Washington, and one of the most recognizable brands on K Street. The firm, which turns 50 this year, has about 550 lawyers, including 120 lobbyists….
At the time, small boutique lobbying firms were the industry standard, and they were mostly led by former heads of federal agencies who became lobbyists after leaving the government. Boggs and Patton envisioned a different kind of lobbying operation — one that was integrated into a major law firm, staffed with attorneys well-versed in the areas of law that lobbyists were looking to change.
“Tom saw the niche no one else saw — of substantive law combined with lobbying,” said the firm’s managing partner Ed Newberry. “So when a Patton Boggs lawyer went to the Hill to talk to the staff director, who was a well-trained lawyer, they were talking to them as a well-trained lawyer, not as a lobbyist who said, ‘Come on, do me a favor.’ ”
The formula served them well….
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/capitalbusiness/patton-boggs-moves-to-reinvent-itself/2012/10/14/c8e26278-13eb-11e2-ba83-a7a396e6b2a7_story.html

I really hope Delingpole is correct and these parasites crash and burn.

But this is standard operating procedure for our environmentally concerned citizens, basically they extort all development and any developer they can put the arm on.
It is not just the Ecuadorian government that is corrupt.
So many of our municipal and provincial governments have passed laws enabling this kind of shakedown.
Our Kleptocrats applaud this behaviour as “environmentally responsible”.

courages
Might that be courageous?
[Fixed, thanks. ~mod.]

After following some of Delingpole’s links, what appalled me was finding out that there are now “investment funds” who specialize in “litigation finance”. The one that bankrolled this case (in addition to the law firms) is Burford Capital.

We provide financing in the areas of litigation and arbitration. Our goal is to “unlock” the value of the underlying claims to benefit our clients. We can fund a case, finance operating expenses, monetize a judgment, and more.

Also, I saw (as I’m sure others here did) lots of parallels with Climategate.
One aspect of the Chevron case, the judge’s decision being ghostwritten for him by the plaintiff, particularly reminded me of this email:

I expect that you have already been made aware of the petition to EPA from the Competitive Enterprise Institute (and Pat Michaels) calling for a re-opening of public comment on EPA’s prospective “endangerment” finding on greenhouse gases. CEI is charging that the CRU at East Anglia has destroyed the raw data for a portion of the global temperature record, thus destroying the integrity of the IPCC assessments and any other work that treats the UK Jones-Wigley global temperature data record as scientifically legitimate.
[…]
Who is responding to this charge on behalf of the science community? Surely someone will have to, if only because EPA will need to know exactly what to say.

How on earth has there not been an Ethics Complaint submitted to disbar any American attorney involved in this debacle? Surely the federal judge has an obligation to submit it

Everybody wins, any losses will be covered by the taxpayers.

YES!!!
Thank You God, for giving Chevron’s CEO John S Watson the courage to ‘stand your ground’.
And Thank You again God, for giving U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan the tenacity to dig through the details of the case… and the outtakes from that idiots self-aggrandizing movie… to discover the truth of the fr@ud and deliver the blows of justice about the head and shoulders of the Green Cabal et.al.
Hot Damn – Yes!!!

I am going to give the John Galt award to both Chevron and Robinson Helicopter.
My state of the Peoples Republic Of California threatened to impose some new
Draconian regulations against the oil refineries. Chevron responded by asking
the Democrats in Sacramento, which of the two refineries (Richmond or El Segundo)
were they wiling to see closed? And how much tax revenue they were willing to forego.
The vampire tax suckers backed down in a millisecond!
The federal legislature called the owner of Robinson Helicopter (Just down the street from me,)
to testify under oath about the number of crashes and deaths associated with his products.
He said SCREW YOU! My products meet and exceed all safety standards. I sell cheap
rotary wing aircraft. In fact, I sell more than any other manufacturer in the world. So it stands
to reason that there are a higher number of crashes in my product.
He basically invited them to punish him! He told them fine me, I will shut down my factory and
deny the local, state and federal government untold millions in tax revenues.
We need more companies like this!

Jim Bo said
“From Wall Street Journal…
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan on Monday found that New York lawyer Steven Donziger and his litigation team engaged in coercion, bribery, money laundering and other criminal conduct in their effort to obtain a multibillion dollar pollution judgment in Ecuador against Chevron Corp.
Would it be naive to expect that a federal indictment might be appropriately forthcoming?”
In a world of standards no. In today world yes it would be naive.

Donziger. Petard. Hoist.

Rud Istvan says: March 6, 2014 at 8:21 pm
Chickens are coming home…
To quote the great French philosopher Eric Cantona
‘When the seagulls follow the trawler, it is because they think sardines will be thrown into the sea.’

I didn’t know what the name of that crime is, wws. Thank you. That historically, is a crime, and is done with intentional will to thwart the interests of justice itself: which of course are that people even have enough faith on the justice system, to rely on it, principly,
and pursuit of real fairness such that investments and civilizational trade might go forth, in real world terms.
wws says:
March 6, 2014 at 8:27 pm
What disgusts me most about the financing of lawsuits by groups like Burford, is that under the old English Common Law this was both a crime and a tort known as “Champarty”. A couple of hundred years ago our legal system saw this as flagrantly corrupt and criminal behavior, but now we have “advanced” so far that we no longer seem to be able to see anything wrong with it.

I presume that the US Governments next step will be to set the Federal Tax Office on to Judge Lewis Kaplan and try and get him replaced by an activist shill. They are already trying to destroy corporations like Chevron…see: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-03-04/obama-seeks-100-billion-in-new-taxes-on-multinationals.html
This minor setback must not be allowed to divert the green gravy train…..There is a planet to be saved from its inhabitants by the chosen ones.

And of course the helicopter rides…

Now beat ABC and CBS with their hubris. 1300 days of one sided propaganda is too long. http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/sean-long/cold-shoulder-abc-cbs-exclude-scientists-critical-global-warming-more-1300-days

‘Indeed. What Kaplan concluded beyond reasonable doubt was that Donziger’s case was constructed on a web of lies, deceit and corruption.’
For this behaviour a lawyer here would be dispelled from the Dutch Association of Lawyers.

And the snakes try to squeeze you to death, and the ten-foot catfish – forget the piranhas – will attack and eat you. Don’t even get me started on the arachnids and insects.

This was the moment when the rise of the green menace began to slow and our culture began to heal.

“Yesterday we had a 5-hour [meeting] and it was extremely intense and frustrating.
Went through options on Global [Expert] – had Plans A through E, and I realized
how difficult this aspect of the case is going to be. Bottom line problem is we will
have no control over the [expert], who will be appointed by the judge. Pablo and
our legal team keep insisting that the solution is for the judge to appoint someone
who is favorable to us, but I don’t trust this approach so far.”
He still doesn’t seem get it. No one in Ecuador expects a dime out of Chevron, although they’ll take it if it happens. They are all working together to shake down Donziger & Co. In my humble opinion.

What great news after the depressing week I’ve had. I’m switching exclusively to Chevron gas!

Donziger made the wrong movie. This story should be made into a movie! It would be a great one!

@goldminor
“If the situation in Ecuador had been so serious and devastating, then why didn’t their government come in and take care of the mess first and then sue afterwards. I imagine that the locals did suffer, but they should have blamed their lousy government for not taking care of their own people.”
Well, that might have been a reasonable outcome if the government had developed ‘normally’ over the past few decades. One example is if the economy had developed for the benefit of the general population people might be more empowered and the environment better protected. If the CIA had not assassinated the President (and the President of Panama within a period of 4 months) things might have turned out very differently. You can read about it in, “Confessions of an Economic Hitman” by John Perkins whose job it was to screw up the economy of Ecuador and bring the whole country into a condition of debt servitude – something he felt very guilty about later on.
Judges who will sell their souls for $500,000 are the bread and butter of the pillaging of the economies of developing countries. So in this case the sticky hands of a big oil company look cleaner than the greasy hands of Big Green Slime.
This is an appalling spectacle. I doubt anyone in Ecuador sees much reason to rejoice.

I read the whole opinion. While it’s true that Judge Kaplan declined to rule on the merits of the case against Chevron, it’s also clear that lawyer Donziger’s choice of fraudulent tactics cast enormous doubt on his case. What pushed him over to the “dark side” (in his own words) was the need to fiddle with expert evidence that was looking uncomfortably like an exoneration of Texaco–which had long since remediated its old spill–and like an indictment of the Ecuadorian-government-owened successor drilling operation, which apparently is still spewing crude.
Nevertheless, strictly speaking, the Kaplan ruling does not overturn the Ecuadorian judgment but only denies Donziger and a few others from benefiting from it by collecting their expected contingency fees: $600 million in Donziger’s case. The Ecuadorian plaintiffs are going right ahead with collection in some South American countries where Chevron still has assets.

George Lawson says: @ March 7, 2014 at 2:47 am
Let us hope that all other oil companies take a leaf out of Chevron’s book, and have the backbone to stand up to these green criminals….
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Your forget that Shell and BP have been in on the scam from the very start. They helped fund CRU for example. And the e-mails talk of getting grants from shell.
Shell Oil’s VP Ged Davis was an IPCC lead author for scenarios (The scenarios used to generate those climate models) Ged Davis’s scenarios are in the e-mails asking Climate Scientists for comments.
Enron And BP Invented The Global Warming Industry ” I know because I was in the room.”

Alan Watt, Climate Denialist Level 7:
…my curiousity is not not sufficient to motivate me to read the entire decision.
I am not so easily bored…. : > )
Several of the firms and attorneys that got drawn into this come off looking pretty clean. Hard as it is for the public to believe, even lawyers can be innocent victims. Lying to his legal counsel may have been the dumbest thing Donziger did.

@goldminor
>The removal of Noriega was no loss for anyone. I don’t recall what happened in Ecuador. I,ll look it up.
John Perkins does not refer to Noreiga, which is a really interesting story too involving some of the the same chaps, but to Torrijos who effectively ran the country http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panamanian_presidential_election,_1978. Perkins’ job was to get Panama deeply into debt as he had been doing with Ecuador with the threat that if Torrijos didn’t sign, he would be removed. Torrijos agreed to approve deals on condition that with each one, something had to actually benefit the poor of Panama. Perkins agreed and they made a number of deals. He was in any case blown up in 1981. But don’t rely on my inadequate memory of it, read Perkins’ account as “he was in the room”.

Texan99 says:
March 7, 2014 at 6:54 am
“The Ecuadorian plaintiffs are going right ahead with collection in some South American countries where Chevron still has assets.”
Who’s leading those collection efforts? If it’s Donziger & Co, I suspect he’ll just end up being shaken down for more “facilitating fees”. Similar to a Nigerian bank victim.

Will the Ecuadorian prosecution service or equivalent be seeking the extradition of those involved ?

It’s all on You Tube

“It’s illegal to conspire to break the law”

Doesn’t matter who appointed this judge he recognized legal BS and made the correct call. I hope he refers these people for prosecution, as this is a criminal enterprise and should definitely be subject to prosecution. The lawyer should also be disbarred.

I am always happy to see “Big Mean Green” set back on its tail. Those idealist extortionists are gradually taking over the world. And in the process are damaging and preventing practical ‘relatively green’ solutions arising. In this case I have no doubt a lot of environmental damage was done, and I accept it was largely cleaned up by Chevron, and we now also know that oil does biodegrade quite handily and quickly.
But the power of big business today worries the hell out of me. For example, don’t think for a moment that those big multinational interlinked and and government infiltrated financial organizations don’t love the idea of carbon trading, and are doing everything they can to make it work.
It is well worth reading the New Yorker article to get a slightly more nuanced view of the case:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/09/120109fa_fact_keefe?currentPage=all
Donziger’s motivations may not have been only about money, Chevron played their share of tricks, Judge Kaplan made some very extreme decisions in the case, and Chevron are spending more per year for decades than an earlier settlement would have cost.
And the power of big business and the scale of money legal firms are paid is mind-boggling.
Here are some interesting extracts:

“The meek shall inherit the earth,” the oilman J. Paul Getty once observed. “But not its mineral rights.”
[..] Randy Mastro [says] […] This suit is driven not by poor Ecuadorans, […] but by “lawyers and consultants and financiers.”
Donziger’s ambition was certainly grandiose, but it seemed motivated as much by a combative idealism as by a desire for riches. He wanted to recalibrate the power dynamic that had traditionally made it difficult for marginalized foreigners to sue American companies. He felt that he was creating a viable “business model for a human-rights case.”
[…]
In August, 2009, Chevron […] released video footage that allegedly implicated the judge then presiding over the Lago Agrio case, Juan Nuñez, in a bribery scheme. An Ecuadoran businessman named Diego Borja had been hoping to secure a cleanup contract in the event of a judgment against Chevron. But when Borja met with the judge and a Correa administration official, the company explained, he was informed that he first needed to pay a million dollars each to Nuñez, to the administration, and to the Lago Agrio plaintiffs. Borja and an associate secretly recorded the discussions, using cameras embedded in a watch and a pen. Charles James, a Chevron executive, declared, “This information absolutely disqualifies the judge and nullifies anything that he has ever done in this case.”
Judge Nuñez stepped aside. But he insisted that he was innocent. The videos, which Chevron posted online, showed Borja and the official elliptically discussing the possibility of a bribe with Nuñez, but offered no proof that the judge had solicited or accepted one. Nuñez told me that the scandal was a setup, and Donziger has called the incident “a Chevron sting.” It has subsequently emerged that the purported Correa administration official was in fact a Quito car salesman and part-time caterer, whose name does not appear in a party database of registered members. The businessman, Borja, was a former Chevron contractor.
Chevron insists that it did not prompt Borja to raise discussions about paying bribes, and says that he was not compensated for his efforts. But, according to court documents, Borja and his wife were relocated, at Chevron’s expense, to the U.S., and supplied with a house, a car, a generous monthly stipend, and the services of a top criminal-defense attorney. The attorney would not make Borja available to speak with me, but a friend of Borja’s, Santiago Escobar, told me that Judge Nuñez was innocent, and that Borja concocted the scheme to entrap him. “He’s not a good Samaritan,” Escobar said. “He was looking for money.”
[…]
But, if [green guide] Moncayo’s cadences were rote, there was nothing feigned about his indignation. He led me down a steep ravine to a creek. […] the water, which was only a foot deep, looked crystalline. Moncayo drove a stick into the creek bed and churned the mud until the water grew clouded by sediment. […] … I skimmed my hand across the surface of the creek. My palm was coated in an acrid film.
[…]
Jim Craig, a Chevron spokesman, took me around Lago Agrio. He told me that the company has taken its own water samples in the Oriente, and has never identified a positive reading for hydrocarbon contamination. He speculated that, in some cases, the plaintiffs may have “spiked” local water sources after Chevron did its tests.
[…]
Normally, a lawyer who is subpoenaed creates a log of any confidential documents to be withheld. But Chevron was requesting Donziger’s entire case file—documents spanning nearly two decades—and Donziger did not have a staff of associates to help him go through it. When he failed to deliver a privilege log that met Kaplan’s approval, the judge […] granted Chevron access to Donziger’s confidential documents. Donziger was forced to turn over two hundred thousand pages of material.
Twenty Gibson, Dunn associates set to work reviewing stacks of memos and e-mails marked “Confidential” and “Attorney Work Product.” They averaged five thousand pages a day.
Gibson, Dunn also requested, and received, Donziger’s tax returns, his bank-account information, and his personal computers. Technicians forensically scanned his hard drives, and Gibson, Dunn copied everything they found. An attorney for Donziger protested that this meant that Chevron’s lawyers could interrogate his communications with his wife, as well as other unrelated matters.“He doesn’t have any other matters,” Kaplan said. “This is his life.”
Kaplan’s decision was extreme; rarely had such a wealth of sensitive material been handed to a legal adversary. As Gibson, Dunn attorneys fanned across the country, appearing before seventeen federal courts to request further information, one appellate judge noted that the sheer extent of this kind of discovery was “unique in the annals of American judicial history.”
[….]
[re Donziger’s diary notes:] Donziger had worried that Yánez could be manipulated into making a corrupt ruling. But, in urging him to remain upright, the plaintiffs were exploiting Yánez’s vulnerabilities as leverage. “So instead of a strong judge who sees the viability of our case,” Donziger wrote, “we now might have a weak judge who wants to rule correctly for all the wrong, personal reasons.”
[….]
Mastro […] asked Judge Kaplan to bar Donziger and his colleagues from trying to collect on the judgment not just in New York but anywhere in the world. [….]
Kaplan was sympathetic to this position. As he put it, “I don’t think there is anybody in this courtroom who wants to pull his car into a gas station to fill up and find that there isn’t any gas because these folks have attached it in Singapore or wherever else.” He granted the injunction.
[….]
…. If Kaplan’s injunction was upheld, it would create a major precedent, effectively allowing American courts to pass judgment on the transparency or corruption of their foreign counterparts, and set aside verdicts against American companies when the legal systems issuing them were deemed problematic. The prospect was breathtaking: Chevron looked poised not only to avoid liability but also to acquire greater immunity in its actions abroad. Shell, Dole, and Dow Chemical submitted a brief to the court, urging it to side with Chevron. On September 16th, three appellate judges took their seats in a courtroom in downtown Manhattan. […]
The oral arguments took place on a Friday. Normally, appeals courts take several months after hearing arguments to rule on a case, but the judges were ready the following Monday. In a terse, unanimous decision, they reversed Judge Kaplan, and dissolved the injunction.
[…]
Chevron has appealed the eighteen-billion-dollar judgment in Ecuador. It has also tried to block the lawsuit by appealing to an arbitration tribunal in The Hague. But the case could still end in a settlement.
[…]
…in 2001 the plaintiffs indicated, in writing, that they would drop their claims in exchange for a hundred and forty million dollars. But, on the eve of the Chevron merger, Texaco walked away from the offer. Chevron will not comment, but the plaintiffs estimate that the company now spends roughly that amount each year to fight the case.

From the New York Times:

But Chevron turned the tables on him by gaining access in Judge Kaplan’s court to outtakes of the film that highlighted his unorthodox style. One outtake filmed in an Ecuadorean restaurant showed a consultant telling Mr. Donziger that there was no evidence that contamination had spread from the oil pits. But Mr. Donziger was unpersuaded. “This is Ecuador, O.K.,” he said. “At the end of the day, there are a thousand people around the courthouse; you will get whatever you want. Sorry, but it’s true.”

Stark Dick says: March 8, 2014 at 11:11 am
“markx says….. well worth reading the New Yorker article to get a slightly more nuanced view of the case:”
Well, I laughed, so your comment didn’t go entirely unappreciated.
Hi Stark,
I am pleased that you read it. No doubt Chevron have used their own full array of dirty tricks, and I am sure a full reading of all their correspondence and computer hard drives would be interesting. In much the same way the climategate emails were.
All publications/ media outlets tend to have their own political/other leanings; even this good site belonging to Anthony Watts. You can agree with them, disagree with them, laugh at them or cry at them, and all is well and good.
But, you ignore them at your peril.