Law Blog doesn’t know where U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan plans to spend the holidays, but one thing is sure: he’ll have plenty to read while he’s there.
Judge Kaplan is presiding over the racketeering case of New York lawyer Steven Donziger, whom Chevron Corp. has accused of fraud, conspiracy and a host of other unseemly actions relating to a massive environmental verdict against the oil giant in an Ecuadorean court. Both sides have spent millions of dollars on the case since Chevron first filed suit in 2011, and the docket has ballooned to a truly impressive 1,850 or so documents since closing arguments last month in Judge Kaplan’s Manhattan courtroom.
Some hefty additions landed in the docket late on Tuesday: the post-trial briefs the judge requested from Chevron, Mr. Donziger’s defense team and the lawyer representing two Ecuadorean co-defendants.
All told, the briefs total 1,089 pages, including exhibits and other supplementary filings. That’s one page longer than this hardcover edition of David Foster Wallace’s “Infinite Jest,” and some 60 pages shorter than this edition of “Don Quixote” by Miguel De Cervantes.
The contents (which Law Blog confesses to only having skimmed) should come as no surprise to those who have followed the case thus far. A quick recap:
Mr. Donziger led a team representing Ecuadorean villagers who sued over decades-old pollution from oil exploration in the Amazon rainforest. Chevron has denied liability for any contamination, and says the $9.5 billion judgment issued in 2011 was fraudulently obtained because the plaintiffs’ team allegedly agreed to pay off court officials, fabricated evidence and ghostwrote much of the final judgment. Mr. Donziger has denied those allegations and says he acted in good faith as an advocate for his clients, though he conceded in court that environmental consultants on his team did write portions of a report from a supposedly independent expert.
In the latest filings Chevron (which submitted more than 900 pages) portrayed Mr. Donziger as a money-mad attorney who engineered a transnational fraud in hopes of a huge payoff, and said he and the defendants failed to disprove any of the claims against them:
Thus, this trial record proved what Chevron has been saying all along—that Donziger, who professes merely to be a lawyer representing clients, is, in reality, a liar, con man, and criminal who has headed a racketeering enterprise targeting Chevron as its deep-pocketed victim… Indeed, Donziger himself stands to personally make $600 million or more if this scheme succeeds. Chevron asks this Court to exercise its equitable power to prevent Defendants from profiting from their crimes, and to remedy the harm to Chevron.
Mr. Donziger’s team in turn argued that there is no legal basis for the RICO case and said Judge Kaplan lacked jurisdiction to rule on “whether norms of Ecuadorian civil procedure or legal ethics have been followed.” They said Chevron’s star witness, a former Ecuadorean judge, lacked credibility and said the company, having failed to win on the merits in Ecuador, “has pursued a spare-no expense campaign of retaliation and personal destruction across courtrooms and continents.”
Reply briefs are due on Jan. 10, 2014. Feliz Navidad, prospero año y felicidad!
Meanwhile, the welter of related legal actions continues to unfold here and abroad. Earlier this month a Canadian court ruled that the Ecuadorean plantiffs, who are seeking to enforce the $9.5 billion judgment abroad, can attempt to seize Chevron’s assets in Canada. And in January, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, arbitration resumes in an action Chevron brought against the Republic of Ecuador, which it alleges failed to protect the company’s due-process rights per a bilateral investment treaty with the U.S.
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