Loading...
Chevron is punching back. After two decades of suits from Patton Boggs, who has brought three lawsuits against Chevron, the energy company has sought a federal judge’s permission to sue back, which they filed last Friday. Patton Boggs once looked like the heroes of the case, bringing a suit against Chevron claiming it caused pollution with oil spills that affected Ecuadorian farmers. Two of the suits Boggs brought against Chevron have been dismissed, and the third was transferred from Newark to New York by a federal judge, Esther Salas, who, according to the International Business Times, scolded the firm for using “jurisdictional maneuvering.”
An Ecuadorian court awarded a group of farmers $18 billion in February of 2011 on behalf of Boggs, only for Chevron to successfully appeal the action, exposing fraud and deceit in Boggs’ handling of the case.
“Chevron maintains that the [Ecuadorian] judgment is illegitimate because of documented evidence of fraud and unethical action by the plaintiff’s lawyers, as well as the Ecuadorian government and judiciary,” as Chevron’s website says. “These fraudulent actions include the plaintiffs’ lawyers falsifying data in multiple instances and in the name of supposedly independent environmental experts, paying experts to ghostwrite exaggerated environmental-impact assessments and bribing the judge who allowed the plaintiff’s lawyers to write the actual judgment issued against Chevron.”
