Given U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s previous rulings in Chevron’s racketeering case against plaintiffs lawyer Steven Donziger and others, it would have been a surprise if the judge granted a motion by Donziger’s lawyers at Keker & Van Nest to dismiss the case outright. And indeed, on Monday Kaplan refused to throw out the case–though he did toss related claims of fraud and tortious interference.
As anyone following Chevron’s Ecuadorean saga will recall, Chevron its lawyers at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher sued Donziger and related defendants in U.S. District Court in Manhattan in February 2011, just weeks before an Ecuadorean judge handed down an $18.2 billion judgment against the oil giant in the Lago Agrio environmental contamination case. In addition to claiming that Ecuador’s courts were corrupt, Chevron alleged that Donziger, who’s the lead U.S. lawyer for the Amazonian plaintiffs, and several other plaintiffs lawyers and consultants conspired to extort and defraud Chevron by fabricating evidence, intimidating witnesses, and making false and misleading statements to U.S. courts.
