Chevron: can you handle the truth about your crimes

NEW YORK, Aug. 24 /CSRwire/ - Steven Donziger, a sole practitioner in New York, filed claims against Chevron in federal court charging the oil giant with orchestrating an illegal campaign of intimidation and lies to evade paying a $19 billion court judgment for creating what experts believe is the world's worst oil-related environmental disaster.

The Donziger lawsuit is available here. A blog from The Chevron Pit explaining the development is below and also can be read here.
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 22, 2012

Lawyer for Ecuadorians Turns the Tables On Chevron and Sues Oil Giant

Chevron: can you handle the truth about your crimes in Ecuador?

New York lawyer Steven Donziger is going after Chevron, its CEO John Watson, and its General Counsel R. Hewitt Pate for orchestrating a campaign by the oil giant to evade paying a $19 billion judgment in Ecuador by targeting and defaming Donziger and other members of the legal team. Donziger, a litigator who has dedicated most of his professional work to the field of human rights advocacy, battled for almost two decades to help indigenous and farmer groups in Ecuador’s rainforest hold Chevron accountable for the deliberate dumping of billions of gallons of toxic waste onto their ancestral lands, leading to the decimation of traditional cultures and an outbreak of cancer that has killed or threatens to kill thousands of people. See this article in Courthousenews.com.

(For background on Chevron's human rights violations in Ecuador and fraudulent cover-up, see this devastating video. For a written summary of the overwhelming evidence against Chevron relied on by the Ecuador court in finding the company guilty, see here.)

Donziger, represented by John Keker of San Francisco’s Keker & Van Nest, quietly filed a 158-page compendium of claims against the oil giant last week in New York federal court. The lawsuit can be read here starting on p. 92. Donziger, who lives in a small apartment in New York City with his wife and son, had previously been sued (along with his clients) for $57 billion by Chevron as part of an outrageous and trumped-up civil racketeering claim. Chevron claimed that the entire Ecuador case – which includes 64,000 chemical sampling results proving toxic contamination at the company’s hundreds of well sites in the Amazon -- was an attempt by Donziger and his clients to extort money from the company.
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