By Ashby Jones
The crazed litigation between Chevron Corp. and plaintiffs over alleged oil pollution in Ecuador on Monday got just a little bit crazier.
The oil giant turned the litigation upside-down by filing suit against the plaintiffs.
The suit, filed in Manhattan federal court, accuses the plaintiffs, their lawyers and other members of their legal team of conspiring to manufacture evidence, intimidate Ecuadorian court officials and withhold evidence from U.S. courts. Clickhere for the story, from the WSJ’s Ben Casselman; here for the complaint; here for Chevron’s press release. Click here, here, here, here, here, and here for previous LB posts on the case.
The suit is yet another twist in an epic 18-year-old legal battle that pits one of the world’s biggest oil companies against residents of Ecuador’s Amazon region. Those residents are suing Chevron in Ecuador, seeking to hold the company responsible for billions of dollars of environmental damage they say was caused by Texaco Inc. Chevron, which inherited the lawsuit when it bought Texaco in 2001, says the suit is little more than an elaborate shakedown attempt.
“The intent of the misconduct has been to extort a multi-billion dollar payment from Chevron through fabricated evidence and a campaign to incite public outrage,” the company said in a statement Tuesday.
The plaintiffs, however, said Chevron’s suit was an attempt to distract attention from the evidence of oil pollution in Ecuador. A ruling in that case is expected sometime this year.
“Chevron’s latest action in this 18-year-old litigation is nothing short of legal intimidation by a reckless corporation,” plaintiffs’ spokeswoman Karen Hinton said in a statement.
The suit is just the latest in a series of aggressive legal maneuvers by Chevron. At the company’s request, judges across the U.S. have ordered the plaintiffs to turn over a trove of emails, internal memos, videos and even the private diaries of their former lead U.S. attorney, Steven Donziger.
In a statement Tuesday, Donziger’s attorney, Gerald Lefcourt, called the suit “a cynical bid to buy cover.”
Chevron’s lawsuit was filed under the Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, known as RICO. Although best known for its criminal provisions used to take down Mafia kingpins, RICO also allows individuals and companies to pursue civil suits if they can prove they have been harmed by a “criminal enterprise.”
The suit names as defendants Donziger and the 47 named plaintiffs, as well as their Ecuadorian attorneys and several scientific experts that have worked on the plaintiffs’ behalf.
