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...except that this guy was convicted of corruption, in US court. And while this article tries to insinuate that judge Kaplan was corrupt...the conviction was u
by darawk 6y ago
...except that this guy was convicted of corruption, in US court. And while this article tries to insinuate that judge Kaplan was corrupt...the conviction was upheld on appeal:
> In 2014, after a full trial before Judge Kaplan, Donziger and the other defendants were found guilty of engaging in conspiracy and criminal conduct.
> “Donziger and the Ecuadorian lawyers he led corrupted the Lago Agrio case. They submitted fraudulent evidence. They... falsely presented [a damages assessment] as the work of the court-appointed and supposedly impartial expert, and told half-truths or worse to U.S. courts in attempts to prevent exposure of that and other wrongdoing. [They] wrote the Lago Agrio court’s Judgment themselves and promised $500,000 to the Ecuadorian judge to rule in their favor and sign their judgment,” Judge Kaplan found. “If ever there were a case warranting equitable relief with respect to a judgment procured by fraud, this is it.”
> The ruling was affirmed by a decision issued by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in August 2016, with the appellate court finding “no basis for dismissal or reversal” of the district court’s judgment, noting that “the record in the [case] reveals a parade of corrupt actions… including coercion, fraud and bribery, culminating in the promise to Judge Zambrano of $500,000 from a judgment in favor of the [plaintiffs].”
So...it seems like he probably did engage in corruption to secure the original verdict.
- knl 6y agoThe article also states that this Ecuadorian judge later admitted he had lied about the bribe, and has met with Chevron 30+ times before the trial.
- darawk 6y agoThe judge admitted that before the appellate court ruling: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S.-Appeals-Court-Affirms-RICO-Judgment-Lawyer https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20160808006005/en/U.S... https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-witness-admits-to-lying-in-the-amazon-pollution-case https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/neye7z/chevrons-star-witn... The appellate court could have and would have considered this, and decided that it did not reverse the finding of the lower court.
- knl 6y agoIsn’t then the court statement illogical? The judge admitted he lied, yet the appellate court states that they uphold the original verdict because Dozinger bribed the judge?
- darawk 6y agoProbably worth reading the actual appellate court decision: https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opinion.pdf https://theamazonpost.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/CA2-Opi... Notably, their appeal didn't even challenge the factual findings of the lower court with regards to their own corruption. So, there isn't even any real dispute about that. They did obtain the verdict corruptly, what they attempted to challenge was the legal authority of the lower court to overturn the Ecuadorian decision, and the appellate court rejected that.
- wombatmobile 6y agoAny thoughts, darawk, about the "more than 16 million gallons of crude oil, 80 times more oil than was spilled in BP’s 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster."? You do know that the oil wasn't "spilled" in the Amazon forest, don't you? It was placed in unlined pits, which were never rehabilitated.
- darawk 6y agoI think it sounds like a bad thing, but it also seems that Chevron claims to have remediated it, and it's a little unclear what the real facts of the situation are at this point.
- makomk 6y agoYeah, and if I'm following all this correctly, part of the basis for the US court rulings is that the Ecuadorian court-appointed experts found that Texaco (now part of Chevron) had in fact remediated the first few sites that were inspected, and that the lawyer in question apparently got around this by using extremely dubious methods to get the court to cancel the remaining inspections and appoint a single "independent" expert instead who secretly let the plaintiffs write their report. The "controversial discovery process" seems to have turned up a whole bunch of e-mails and video records of this happening, and if I'm understanding the ruling correctly, Donziger even admitted to a lot of this in his own testimony and depositions to the US courts. I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure it's a bad sign when your attorney doesn't want documents disclosed to the court because "the effects are potentially devastating in Ecuador (apart from destroying the proceeding, all of us, your attorneys, might go to jail)"... and then that e-mail gets obtained by the court.