In Fraudulent Suit Against Chevron, One Honest Judge Makes A Difference By Gerald Walpin
At first glance, it appeared that the poor and downtrodden had obtained justice against the rich and powerful:
New York attorney Steven Donziger, in Ecuador, obtained a $19 billion judgment against Chevron in favor of 47 indigenous people from Ecuador’s backwoods to compensate them for oil exploration pollution.
But that supposed “justice” was discovered to be injustice, the result of lying, bribery and fraud. While an unbelievable story for a movie, it is the truth as found by a respected New York federal judge. Here is how it was uncovered.
Chevron started the New York lawsuit seeking an injunction against Donziger, to prevent enforcement of the Ecuadorian judgment. Chevron’s heart must have dropped when Judge Lewis Kaplan was assigned as judge.
Well-known for hard work and intelligence, Kaplan’s background suggested sympathy for the underdog, a category into which these Ecuadorian plaintiffs fit. Appointed by President Clinton, he was previously a trustee of the Lawyers’ Committee For Civil Rights Under Law.
What Judge Kaplan found from 68 witnesses and thousands of exhibits caused him to do justice by enjoining Donziger from collecting on the judgment. In a 485-page opinion detailing Donziger’s fraud, Kaplan aptly described the evidence as “extraordinary,” creating a picture that “normally comes out of Hollywood.”
According to Kaplan, the real-life plot included “coded emails” describing Donziger’s “private interactions with and machinations directed at judges and a court-appointed expert”; his “payments to a supposedly neutral expert out of a secret account”; “ex parte meetings with judges”; and inducing a criminal indictment of two Ecuadorian lawyers defending Chevron “force (Chevron) to the table for a possible settlement,” as Donziger later explained.
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