Chevron to Appeal $8 Billion Suit - Image: Josh Smith (Flickr.com CC-BY-SA 2.0)
Chevron, the oil and energy company headquartered in California has been told to payout $8 billion in a lawsuit brought on behalf the Ecuadorean people affected by alleged environmental soil and watercourse contamination.
The case goes back to oil operations and the alleged dumping of waste water containing chemical contaminants that went on through the sixties to the nineties by Texaco. When Texaco was bought by Chevron in 2001, the operations were continued by PetroEcuador, a state-held energy company. Chevron claims that at that time they cleaned up their portion of waste products from oil wells and production facilities.
The ruling, laid out by an Ecuadorean court, has been labeled as illegitimate by Chevron, who also won a court order last week barring enforcement of the suit in the US and elsewhere in the world. The suit alleges that the contaminated ponds were responsible for monetary loss, illnesses and even deaths within the resident Amazonian communities and the original claim was for $27 billion in damages.
The highly controversial case has been watched closely for its environmental repercussions and has been replete with claim and counter-claim. In a counter-claim last year, Chevron accused the prosecutors of putting together a fraudulent case and of creating a public relations campaign against the company.
The plaintiffs have also accused Chevron of trying to hide testing of the areas affected by setting up dummy companies. They also allege that the company attempted to entrap a judge that was presiding over the case.
