Even before a judge in Ecuador hit Chevron Corporation with a $19 billion judgment for allegedly fouling the jungles of the country’s Lago Agrio region, the oil giant had claimed it is the victim of a hopelessly corrupt legal system. Now one of the trial judges in the case swears the historic judgment was bought and paid for by the plaintiffs.
Chevron’s lawyers at Gibson Dunn & Crutcher on Jan. 28 filed hundreds of pages with Southern District Judge Lewis Kaplan, who is overseeing Chevron’s racketeering case against plaintiffs lawyer Steven Donziger and others. Among the documents was an affidavit from Alberto Guerra, a former Ecuadorian judge who briefly presided over the Chevron case in Ecuador. In it, Guerra states that he and Nicolas Zambrano, the judge who ultimately handed down the record judgment against Chevron in 2011, offered their services to both Chevron and the plaintiffs. Guerra claims the plaintiffs lawyers bit at the offer, and agreed to pay $500,000 to Zambrano in exchange for being allowed to write the official court judgment against Chevron.
