MANHATTAN (CN) – A federal judge showed no patience Friday for the lawyer whom he blasted last month for using fraud to extort a multibillion judgment from Chevron in Ecuador.
Steven Donziger, an American attorney for Ecuadoreans harmed by decades of oil pollution in the Amazonian rainforest, had hoped to stay a decision finding that his “corrupt means” secured the $9.5 billion judgment against Chevron back in 2011.
U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s 497-page ruling, which included another 87 pages of appendices, forbade Donziger, Hugo Gerardo Camacho Naranjo and Javier Piaguaje Payaguaje from profiting off their bribery scheme.
In refusing to stay that ruling Friday, Kaplan said the irreparable-harm claim contradicts arguments Donziger and his cohorts made to the 2nd Circuit last year. Though Donziger and the others would have to show that they face irreparable harm without a stay of Kaplan’s judgment pending their appeal, “movants identify no credible threat of irreparable injury should that occur.”
“Indeed, their claims of irreparable injury rest on a pastiche of unsupported assertions, contradictions of undisputed evidence, and fertile imagination,” Kaplan wrote. “Nor have they shown any likelihood of appellate success on any legal issue that would alter the relief granted here.”
