There is always a latest chapter in the Legal Fraud of the Century, which is the story of a determined leftist environmentalist cabal’s attempt to shake down of Chevron for many billions over bogus claims – adjudicated in a bribed and perjury-ridden Ecuador courtroom — that the energy company (via Texaco, which it purchased in 2001) had devastated rainforests and forced cancer upon the locals when drilling for oil in the South American country in previous decades.
American courts have ruled that the shakedown – masterminded by Steven Donziger – was a criminal RICO operation. The subsequent wreckage of his cabal (an excellent description of such is Kevin Williamson’s 2014 NR piece on how its nefarious role in the case crushed Patton Boggs) is vast, but like Monty Python’s Black Knight, the disbarred attorney continues to hop the globe seeking a court or international tribunals that will order Chevron or a local subsidiary to fork over the penalty determined by the corrupt Ecuador court.
To no avail. This week, per Reuters, Canada’s Supreme Court ruled to dismiss “all claims attempting to force Chevron Corp’s Canadian unit to pay a $9.5 billion judgment.”
Last September, the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague ruled that because of the scandalous 2011 judgment and process in Ecuador, Chevron had no obligation to pay it, and that the ruling “should not be recognised or enforced by the courts of other States.”
To repeat what National Review has stated about this case (for just a small sampling of our Chevron coverage, click here, here, here, here, and here): In an era where corporations quake and settle over concocted shakedowns, Chevron’s determination to fight, to fight hard, and to prevail in the broadest sense, is heartening. As is its strategy to crush the fraudsters, and their enablers, who figured on turning the company and thereby its shareholders (little old ladies! pension plans! religious-order endowments!) into an ATM that would enrich the accusers and bankroll further schemes of the international Left. Good.
And we repeat this, too: Steven Donziger having engaged in a vast criminal conspiracy, deemed so by a federal judge Lewis Kaplan in New York, the question remains: Why have federal prosecutors not yet sought charges against him and his co-conspirators, who continue to profiteer despite court orders about an undertaking that dwarfs the Varsity Blues Scandal, and likely any other scandal that can be imagined?