Chevron

In the latest remarkable development in the long-running case, the expert consultancy that assisted the plaintiffs, after being sued by Chevron, has flipped:

Stratus Consulting, based in Boulder, Colo., said in a press release today that it “was misled” by [lead plaintiff's attorney Steven] Donziger. Stratus went on to say that the plaintiffs’ legal team used its extensive research as the basis of a 4,000-page report filed with the court in Lago Agrio, Ecuador. The report was supposed to be neutral and independent, but it was not, Stratus said. The consulting firm described a court process in Ecuador that “was tainted by Donziger and the Lago Agrio plaintiffs representatives’ behind-the-scenes activities.”

The Donziger camp fights back — and personally attacks veteran legal reporter Paul Barrett of Bloomberg BusinessWeek, who wrote the above summary — in comments here and here. Much more from Daniel Fisher at Forbes; you can read the damning affidavits from relevant actors at Stratus Consulting here and here.

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Striking new ruling (PDF) from Judge Lewis Kaplan denying lawyers’ request to be excused from a subpoena (courtesy David McGowan, Legal Ethics Forum). “Chevron has established at least probable cause to believe there was fraud or other criminal activity in the procurement of the Judgment and in other respects relating to the Lago Agrio litigation in which that Judgment was rendered and in certain litigations in the United States relating to the Ecuadorian litigation.” Kaplan proceeds to lay out over 70 or so pages the aromatic history of the litigation both in Ecuador and stateside.

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Via an AP dispatch, the Washington Post covers another round, from Argentina, in the long squabbling over whether American-led lawyers can get foreign courts to enforce a $19 billion environmental judgment from the Ecuadorian courts. You’d think this would have made a good occasion for AP or the Post to mention, at least, the sensational developments of three days ago, in which Chevron filed with a court a sworn affidavit in which a former Ecuadorian judge said that he and a second judge had allowed plaintiff’s lawyers to ghostwrite their judgment in exchange for a promised bribe of $500,000. Those allegations were dramatic enough to generate prompt, substantial coverage in places like Fortune, Reuters, Bloomberg, and Forbes, yet the Post still hasn’t mentioned them, unless you count a vague reference in the AP item to longstanding charges of fraud on both sides.

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