[wombatmobile]

Any 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]

I 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]

Yeah, 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.