Steven Donziger Convicted Of Criminal Contempt Of Judge Lewis Lapham

Steven Donziger Convicted Of Criminal Contempt Of Judge Lewis Lapham
Steven Donziger Convicted Of Criminal Contempt Of Judge Lewis Lapham That this case has wound up as a criminal contempt result for famed trial lawyer Steven Donziger comes as no surprise to this vlogger. I've commented on this matter of Chevron and Ecuador and Mr. Donziger since 2007, and so I can point to the moment Steven's approach got the best of him: his obvious and public dislike for New York Federal Judge Lewis Lapham. In 2013 I blogged this: In rejecting Patton Boggs’s request, Judge Lapham has issued a full history of the case, and also extensively explained why he believes Chevron has a good reason to assert that fraud was committed by the plaintiffs in the Lago Agrio v. Chevron case. Here’s that part of the 73-page opinion, the full text of which you can read below, later in this blog post. As a note “the LAPs” refer to the plaintiffs in the Lago Agrio v. Chevron case, which includes most notably Steven Donziger: Chevron has established at least probable cause to believe there was fraud or other criminal activity in the procurement of the Judgment and in other respects relating to the Lago Agrio litigation in which that Judgment was rendered and in certain litigations in the United States relating to the Ecuadorian litigation. Without alluding here to the entirety of its showing, there is probable case to suspect, and often stronger evidence,that: • Representatives of the LAPs bribed the Ecuadorian judge to obtain the result they wanted and, as part of the deal, wrote the Judgment to which the judge put his name. Indeed, there is substantial evidence corroborating this assertion, not least of it the fact that significant parts of the Judgment match – word-for-word – internal work product documents of the LAPs that never were publicly filed in the Lago Agrio case. This latter evidence alone at least gives rise to probable cause to conclude that whoever wrote the Judgment had access to and copied non-record materials that originated with the LAPs. • At an earlier stage of the Lago Agrio litigation, representatives of the LAPs coercerded the then-presiding Ecuadorian judge to terminate judicial inspections of alleged pollution sites, to replace that process with a global expert charged with making an independent evaluation, and to appoint the LAPs’ candidate, Richard Stalin Cabrera Vega (“Cabrera”), to that position. They did so by threatening him with a judicial misconduct complaint if he did not accede to their wishes. • The report that Cabrera ultimately submitted in fact was planned and written, at least in major part and quite possibly entirely, by lawyers and consultants retained on behalf of the LAPs though it was signed by Cabrera and filed as if it were his independent work. LAP representatives, moreover, took a number of steps to create or reinforce the entirely inaccurate contention that the Cabrera report was the unbiased work of an independent expert when, in fact, it had been the work of the LAPs’ representatives themselves and was not independent in the slightest respect. • Once the improprieties surrounding Cabrera began to come to light, the LAPs or their representatives then obstructed justice and committed fraud in at least one Section 1782 proceeding in the United States by submitting to a court in Colorado a deceptive account of the LAPs’ relationship with Cabrera. • At a still earlier stage of the lawsuit in Ecuador, the LAPs filed two site inspection reports with the trial court over the signature of one of their experts that the expert neither adopted nor agreed with. The evidence readily gives rise to the inference that the LAP lawyers wrote the reports, affixed the expert’s signature to them in the knowledge that they did not reflect his views, and filed them. This is the strongest printed argument any judge involved in the Chevron Ecuador case has made against the “LAP’s” as Judge Kaplan calls them. And the full legal opinion is here: https://ift.tt/3ypKK4I I explain what Kaplan then did in 2014 : New York Judge Lewis Kaplan stuck it to Steven Donziger the fraud-prone lead plaintiff lawyer trying to extort billions from Chevron (and who tried to get the federal judge removed from the RICO case against him) yet again. Video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyeQdDHNbdw But with all of that, Donziger refused to follow court order turn over documents or give Chevron the rights to fees he collected during the case. For that, he was found in contempt of court. That's that - nothing to do with environmental debates. Stay tuned.
via YouTube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNLsWRh9dTs