Chevron's latest headache in $19 billion Ecuador case - Fortune Features

Chevron's latest headache in $19 billion Ecuador case - Fortune Features

The appeal has arisen in the civil RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) case Chevron (CVX) filed in 2011 in Manhattan against leaders of the Amazon Defense Front, the group bringing the suit against Chevron in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. The Front alleges that a Texaco subsidiary befouled the Ecuadoran Amazon when it operated an oil-drilling consortium there from 1964 to 1990. In the RICO suit, Chevron, which acquired Texaco in 2001, claims that Front leaders, including its lead American attorney and strategist Steve Donziger, won the $19 billion judgment fraudulently and by breaking U.S. laws against extortion, mail fraud, wire fraud, witness tampering, obstruction of justice, and money laundering.
The RICO case is set to go to trial on October 15 before U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. In its appeal, Donziger and the other RICO defendants are trying to have Judge Kaplan removed, which would probably delay the trial and plop at its helm a relative judicial naïf, unfamiliar with the case's 20-year history of sprawling, multifaceted, fraud-marred, and bombastically propagandized litigation. The appeal is the RICO defendants' sixth attempt to toss Kaplan, whom they have also targeted in a public relations campaign. (Front lawyers, spokespersons, and agents have accused the federal judge of running a "show trial," of being "corrupt" and "racist," of being "open for Chevron's business," of being Chevron's "lackey," and so on.)