Chevron won a battle in the issue of the fraudulent lawsuit stemming from it’s 20 year old departure from oil production in Ecuador.
On Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan granted an order to reject plaintiff’s request to have the American Oil company pay a $21.8 million fine for “lost time following a previous injunction by the judge.”
Amazon Defense Coalition Spokesperson Karen Hinton says that the ruling has “no impact whatsoever on our ability to enforce the $18 billion judgment,” that was ruled by an Ecuadorian judicial system with a Worldwide reputation for corruption.
What Hinton left out of her comments was that the International Tribunal at The Hague ruled that Chevron’s Ecuador arbitration may proceed. And even though that process could take a year, the end result is that Ecuador can’t expect to be able to collect on a fraudulently-obtained judgement before the The Hague’s work is done.
In closing, this has been an example of how some governments try to get away with corrupt practices because a company is American. This has been an issue for some time.