When last this blogger checked, Steven Donziger, the New York-based trial lawyer who made a name for himself pursuing a multi-billion-dollar dream judgement against the oil giant San Ramon, California-based Chevron, was still chasing his fantasy outcome.
Long ago, in 2008, this blogger said that Steven Donziger had dreams of being rich:
And in 2016, Steven Donziger lost yet another Chevron court battle:
You have to ask yourself why Chevron keeps kicking his tail in court? The answer is simple: there’s no real credible evidence that Chevron itself caused the Amazon River to be contaminated with oil from production.
To understand why this is so, you have to know the history, which can be summed up here: Texaco was partnered with Ecuador to produce oil in that country starting in 1967 with the creation of “Text-Pet” – a company that was originally 67 percent owned by Texaco, with the remainder owned by Petroecuador, the state-run oil company of Ecuador.
Between that time and 1992, the level of involvement of Texaco in the partnership decreased and by 1989, Texaco had no official production activities in it, and it’s ownership shares shrank. In 1992, Texaco was out of Ecuador, and signed a contract that resulted in a $40 billion cleanup of its production areas in Ecuador.
Meanwhile, Petroecuador had taken over, and with that action came subsequent oil spills by the thousands of barrels. Ecuador had not, until very recently, addressed this problem. Then came Steven Donziger.
In 1995, Donziger saw an opportunity to take a legal challenge on behalf of Ecuador by claiming that Texaco had not done any of its environmental cleanup work. In 2005, Chevron purchased Texaco, and thus the history of Donziger’s lawsuit.
Donziger buddied up to the then-new regime of Ecuador President Rafael Correa, and in so doing blocked himself from aiming a lawsuit at the real problem: Petroecuador. That was the seed of the many legal losses he’s faced. But because he had a friend in Correa, and was able to manipulate and bribe judges in Ecuador, Donziger was able to land a ruling against Chevron in Ecuador’s court for $8.9 billion in 2014, but there was one giant problem: the way in which Steven used unethical methods to get it made it unenforceable in America according to the United States District Court.
Donziger not only bribed and intimidated Ecuador judges, he was caught on camera admitting that such actions were a necessary part of the culture. He also ghost-wrote the very judgement that the Ecuador judge handed out to Chevron in the process of ruling that the oil company owed Ecuador $8.9 billion.
The United States District Court found Steven Donziger defrauded Chevron.
Donziger believed Lewis Kaplan, the judge for the United States District Court in New York, was biased against him, personally, and so has tried to undo the outcome. And that leads us to the United States Supreme Court, where Steven has asked the high castle to rule on what Kaplan did, with the hope that they undo it.
Everyone is still waiting to learn if The Supreme Court will take up his case.
Stay tuned.