Chevron defeats the Greens with their own hubris

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.