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Gibraltar court rules in favor of Chevron in litigation over Ecuador again
Posted On 28 May 2018
Ecuadornews:
The Civil Division of the Supreme Court of Gibraltar ordered to compensate the US oil company with a sum of 38 million euros. Chevron in a lawsuit that has been in the courts for several years in several countries as a result of a complaint of environmental damage in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
The Gibraltar court, according to a judicial notice to which Efe has had access, grants Chevron compensation for damages and interests and also prevents the defendants from taking legal action again in this case against the oil company.
The judicial notice, dated May 14, affects three people, the Front de Defensa de la Amazonia and the Servicios Fromboliere company.
One of the three people affected by the judicial decision known today is the Ecuadorian Pablo Fajardo, partner of the American lawyer Steven Donzinger and director of the firm Amazonia Recovery, the company created in 2012 in Gibraltar that presented the initial lawsuit filed in Ecuador against the oil company for environmental damage.
The damages that were the reason for this litigation, which has been carried out mainly in Ecuador and the United States, go back to the last century, when Texaco, which was later acquired by Chevron, operated deposits in the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Texaco, which exploited oil in the Ecuadorian Amazon between 1964 and 1990, in turn accused the state company Petroecuador of environmental damage, claiming that after leaving the country in 1990, that company had taken over the fields in that operated.
A judgment of Ecuadorian justice sentenced Chevron in 2013 to a fine of 9,500 million dollars, but later the oil company took the case to a New York court, considering that the trial in Ecuador was fraudulent due to the irregularities observed.
Manhattan judge Lewis Kaplan ruled on March 4, 2014 that, among other irregularities, the Ecuadorian magistrate Nicolás Zambrano had ruled against Chevron with a sentence drafted by the plaintiffs’ attorneys in exchange for half a million dollars.
After hearing the ruling, the legal vice president and legal director of Chevron, R. Hewitt Pate, considered in a statement sent to Efe that the “fraudulent scheme against Chevron Corporation continues to fall apart.”
Almost three years ago, in December 2015, the Supreme Court of Gibraltar already granted Chevron $ 28 million in damages for legal costs in a lawsuit filed there against Amazonia Recovery.
Within that judicial process, which Fajardo did not attend, the Gibraltar Justice decided to issue a ruling in absentia against Amazonia, with the compensation mentioned in favor of Chevron, and also prohibited that company from continuing to participate in the litigation initially started in Ecuador. (I)
