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 Lawyer Steven Donziger is appealing a 500-page decision issued by
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in March that barred him from
collecting on a $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron in the United
States.
Chevron filed a lawsuit against Donziger in New York, claiming he
used bribery and fake evidence to win the historic damage award for
a group of villagers who claimed the oil giant polluted an area of
northeastern Ecuador.
An Ecuadorean judge had awarded the villagers $18 billion in 2011
but the country's high court later cut the judgment in half.
Kaplan ruled Donziger had bribed a former judge to ghost-write the
Ecuadorean judgment and committed other improprieties, finding him
liable for fraud and racketeering.
Donziger had asked Kaplan to put the decision on hold while a
federal appeals court considers the merits of his challenge, a
process that will likely take months to resolve.
But in Friday's order, Kaplan said Donziger's arguments for a stay
were largely "without merit."
Donziger's "claims of irreparable injury rest on a pastiche of
unsupported assertions, contradictions of undisputed evidence and
fertile imagination," Kaplan's opinion said.
Kaplan did grant Donziger narrow relief on one point.
He allowed that the shares Donziger holds in a company called
Amazonia, organized to collect and distribute any proceeds of
Ecuadorean judgment, will be held by the court — not Chevron — pending the final outcome of the appeal.
Chevron spokesman Morgan Crinklaw called the attorney's motion to
stay "yet another attempt to delay and distract from the unrebutted
evidence against him" and said the company was confident it would
win in the appeals court.
Donziger's attorney said he had no comment.
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The long-running case centers on an oil field in the Amazon jungle,
known as Lago Agrio, where Texaco operated from 1964 to 1992.
Chevron later acquired Texaco.
Chevron asserts that Texaco cleaned up the site before handing it
over to a state-controlled company but the villagers say they are
still suffering from the legacy of environmental contamination.
Donziger has repeatedly accused Kaplan of bias and claimed the judge
allowed personal animosity to cloud his decision. He denies the
bribery and fraud allegations.
The New York ruling does not restrict the villagers from trying to
seek enforcement of the Ecuadorean judgment outside the United
States.
A Canadian court ruled in December that Ontario was a proper
jurisdiction for the Ecuadorean plaintiffs to press Chevron to pay
up and the country's Supreme Court earlier this month agreed to hear
the company's appeal of that ruling.
The Ecuadoreans are also pursuing cases in Argentina and Brazil in
the hopes of one day seeing a payout from the case.
The case is Chevron Corp v. Steven Donziger et al, U.S. District
Court for the Southern District of New York, No. 11-0691.
(Additional reporting by Nate Raymond and Joseph Ax;
editing by
David Gregorio)
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