Chevron Corp. won a victory in its long-running battle over toxic waste in Ecuador after an appeals court found the American lawyer representing indigenous villagers committed fraud and barred him from enforcing an $8.6 billion award, Bloomberg reports.
“Even innocent clients may not benefit from the fraud of their attorney,” the appeals court in Manhattan said today, referring to claims that the Ecuadorians’ lawyer had faked evidence and offered bribes. The appeals court upheld a lower-court ruling.
The defeat of lawyer Steven Donziger on appeal could influence the outcome of the storied legal dispute, which was documented in the 2009 film Crude and continues to play out in courts around the world. Ecuadorians are seeking to seize Chevron assets because the company has refused to pay on a judgment awarded in 2011 by an Ecuadorian court.
It is unlikely to be the last twist in the saga, which began in 1993 when American lawyers sued over pollution which they say affects 30,000 indigenous villagers in the oil-rich Lago Agrio region.
The original suit claimed Chevron was financially responsible for pollution of the Amazon rain forest by Texaco Inc. from the 1960s through the early 1990s. Texaco, which was acquired by Chevron in 2001, allegedly filled hundreds of unlined waste pits in the bio-diverse region with toxic, cancer-causing drilling materials rather than following standard industry practice of pumping it into wells deep underground.
