Steven Donziger’s not one to admit defeat, especially when the only alternative is even a sniff at the multi-billion-dollar judgment he thought he managed to swindle out of Chevron in the Chevron Ecuador lawsuit case.
Donziger, a now infamous American New York trial lawyer, spent over 20 years – and an army of so-called environmental consultants, cute young female interns (that Donziger features in one video) and wild-hair non-profits, and over $20 million dollars of money he managed to con from international litigation investment houses – in an effort to take down of the World’s largest oil companies, all over environmental damage done two generations ago, and the fault of Ecuador’s own state-run oil company.
And let’s not forget that Steven said that he was going to be a billionaire from all of this:
What kept the entire fiasco going was Steven Donziger’s own giant level of arrogance – and at a rate so large that he’s even on video carelessly tossing aside the idea that bribing a judge may be a bad thing because “This is Ecuador” as in, ‘Everybody does it, so let’s all be in Rome!’.
Steven Donziger is lucky he’s able to practice law at this point in time, so amazingly, brazenly, against American legal standards have been his practices in the Chevron Ecuador case.
At times, Steven acts like he’s God: it was his berating of United States District Judge for the Southern District of New York Lewis Kaplan that created the scenario of Kaplan being the one to determine Steven’s fate as much as anything else.
Donziger once accused Judge Kaplan of bias and filed to try to have him removed from the RICO case against him. Steven lost when the same U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit of New York that’s going to hear his appeal in the fall, denied his attempt to take out Kaplan in 2013. Not surprisingly, Kaplan was in position to reject Donziger’s claims that he was not guilty of the RICO action. Revenge is a dish best served cold.
Some of Steven’s claims in this case are laughable. For example, Donziger claims that someone was following Ecuador Judge Nicolas Zambrano: “Judge Nicolas Zambrano arrived in New York recently, several unknown operatives met him at JFK airport and followed him around the New York area. We know of no other entity on earth other than Chevron that would have a motive and the means to engage in such behavior, as it has done consistently throughout the pendency of this proceeding.”
Uh, Steven says “ We know of no other entity on earth other than Chevron that would have a motive and the means to engage in such behavior” – bullcorn. It’s the Country of Ecuador! You have to read between the lines with Donziger, or he will have you eating pablum. He didn’t say the “operatives” were unknown to Judge Zambrano, nor did he says that the Judge complained about them. Moreover, there’s no language to suggest the persons actually threatened the Judge in any way.
All of that means it could have been representatives of Ecuador President Rafael Correa working to influence one of their own. Steven knows this could be the case. He also knows that the Judge seems to have a financial interest in the outcome of the case via his job with Refineria Del Pacifico – a firm in which Ecuador’s state-run oil company Petroecuador invests.
Zambrano is known to tell lies: to journalists, or to anyone who may not be in what he believes is in a position to advance his own personal interests. In short, he’s proven he can’t be trusted, yet Steven claims that the Judge is being followed because Zambrano says so. Yeah, right. Did anyone happen to ask Judge Nicolas Zambrano why he had a secretary who was all of just 18-years old?
I’ll bet that’s a reality TV show story right there.
Steven Donziger’s case has been reduced to shreads, both by his actions and by those of the rather grubby people he chose to associate with. He complaines of Zambrano being followed? I can tell you an Amazon Watch operative tried to take a photo of me in court, when the Chevron Ecuador case was in San Francisco in 2007. I’ve gotten death threats and many efforts of harassment and intimidation from Steven Donziger’s Amazon Watch friends.
I’m still standing.
Stay tuned.