Chevron Ecuador: Patton Boggs Owing Chevron $15 Million Shows Donziger Fraud Was Worthless

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donziger-apr-5In this latest round in the Chevron: Ecuador Lawsuit, or I should say string of lawsuits surrounding one big, fraudulently won suit in Ecuador, the lesson becomes crystal clear: lying never pays, and not for Patton Boggs law firm, or for Steven Donziger.

Steven Donziger, the lead plaintiffs lawyer against Chevron – who’s crafted a complex scheme of bought and manufactured science, bribed judges (or at least one), and aided by a greedy, dictatorial politician in Ecuador President Rafael Correa – is learning something that we were all told as small children: it’s always better to tell the truth, or you will get in a lot of trouble.

Only, the nature of this legal entanglement is such that Patton Boggs has reversed course and agreed to pay San Ramon-based Chevron $15 million for its role in crafting a cover-up such that consultants were either paid to craft stories fabricating Chevron’s role in the oil damage actually caused by Petroecuador, Ecuador’s state-run oil company, or who’s names were used to ratify fake data that was then presented to discredit Chevron.

And what was all of this for? Certainly not for any concern for the people of Ecuador’s Amazon, because were that the case, Donziger and his friends at Amazon Watch, the firm that says it advocates for environmental justice in the Amazon, would have called for and done lawsuits against Ecuador itself. They never did, because their real concern was how they could extort billions from an American Oil Company.

They almost got away with it.

Now, some are saying that Patton Boggs decision to pay Chevron $15 million was “humiliating.” It’s not; it was the right thing to do.

What would have been humiliating was to have been jailed for their actions, and to have lost their license to practice law – which still could happen.

Stay tuned.

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