Ecuador’s corrupt, leftist regime and its grifting American lawyers keep losing and losing and losing in a long-running case that proves there is such a thing as international justice.
The latest win for energy giant Chevron against fraudulent claims of environmental despoliation came Monday from the Supreme Court of the Netherlands. The Dutch court rejected Ecuador’s attempt to upend an earlier decision against Ecuador by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague. This follows a recent ruling by Canada’s Supreme Court throwing out Ecuador’s case in that venue. That decision followed years of similar decisions from all over the world after the emergence of abundant evidence that Ecuador, its judges, and its American lawyers had wrongly conspired to bilk Chevron of up to $27 billion.
For those who haven’t followed this saga, the short version is this: In 1992, Ecuador’s state-owned Petroecuador company took over oil leases from Texaco. In 1998, Ecuador’s own government certified that Texaco had performed full and satisfactory remediation of all environmental hazards at those sites. In 2001, Chevron bought Texaco. Shortly thereafter, a new leftist and anti-American government supported a lawsuit against Chevron for the supposed damage that Texaco had done decades earlier, despite Texaco’s clean bill of health.
Thus, Chevron was being asked to pay billions of dollars for sins it had never committed — sins that its new subsidiary Texaco had already been cleared of.
And the details of the attempted skullduggery by Ecuador and its American lawyers were far, far worse than that simple summary describes. They include bribery of Ecuadorian judges, falsified evidence, doctored videos, and much, much more.
Through indefatigable lawyering of its own, Chevron has won every notable decision in these cases in every court in the world other than in Ecuador itself. And Chevron, in turn, is countersuing for legal fees, and the new decisions in Canada and the Netherlands should bolster the company’s case.
As law professor Michael Krauss wrote in Forbes magazine, “Fair damages [assessed against Ecuador] would reach into the hundreds of millions, but any amount will be a fitting end to a sordid chapter in Ecuador’s judicial history.”
Here’s a better idea for needy nations like Ecuador: Rather than trying to rob companies that bring huge amounts of money and jobs to your country, why not lay out a welcome mat while ensuring, on the front end, that all environmental and legal concerns are spelled out in clear, contractual language?
Oil companies may not be saintly. In this case, though, Chevron is innocent, and it is setting a wonderful example of how innocence should be defended.
