22nd March 2011
Amazon Crusader. Chevron Pest. Fraud?
for businessweek.com
“On Feb. 14, Steven R. Donziger won a legal victory of extraordinary proportions. In a small town in eastern Ecuador, a provincial judge in a storefront courtroom ordered Chevron (CVX) to pay $18.1 billion for the benefit of Donziger’s clients, thousands of Amazon villagers who blame the U.S. company’s predecessor for pollution related to oil drilling in the rainforest. On the all-time roster of environmental recoveries, the Chevron judgment—if it were ever collected—would rank second only to BP’s (BP) promised $20 billion fund to compensate victims of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill.
BP, of course, acted in response to hundreds of lawsuits, some filed by famous and powerful class-action lawyers, not to mention dire threats from the Obama Administration. Before taking on Chevron in a brawl that started 18 years ago, Donziger had never brought, let alone won, a civil lawsuit. Not a supermarket slip-and-fall, not a simple contract-gone-sour—nothing. A former public defender, his past clients included thieves and crack dealers. Today he works from a brief-cluttered two-bedroom apartment he shares with his wife and four-year-old son on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. “I have tremendous professional respect for Steven,” says Michael Brune, executive director of the Sierra Club. “He is the driving force behind what’s probably the most important environmental lawsuit in the world seeking to hold an oil company accountable for its actions.”
