The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York has affirmed the lower court ruling that the indigenous plaintiffs from Lago Agrio, their attorney Steven Donziger, and the other members of the Lago Agrio legal team committed fraud and RICO violations in connection with securing a US$9 billion Ecuadorian court judgment against Chevron. Donziger was the lead lawyer for 30,000 residents of the Lago Agrio region in Ecuador that sued Chevron alleging that Texaco Petroleum, which became a Chevron subsidiary in 2001, failed to remediate environmental pollution from oil exploration.

On appeal, Donziger argued that, even if the decision of the Ecuadoran court of first instance was obtained by fraud, the intermediate appellate court had the power to review the decision de novo and even to make its own findings of fact. Since there was no real claim that the appellate court was corrupt or that the appellate decision was obtained by corruption, the appellate decision effectively mooted the claim that the first instance decision was corrupt, according to Donziger. The Second Circuit rejected that argument, noting that the Ecuadorian appeals court "did not alter" the judgment of the court of first instance at all.

The Second Circuit's ruling means that the plaintiffs will be unable to attach Chevron's assets in the US to collect on the Ecuadorian judgment. To the extent the plaintiffs are seeking to enforce the judgment in other nations, courts in those nations now have the Second Circuit's opinion before them, detailing the fraud, coercion, and bribery engaged in by the Lago Agrio plaintiffs' legal team.

The Second Circuit opinion discusses the entire history of this dispute and is 127 pages long. It describes the broad reach of RICO claims and addresses many significant jurisdictional issues.

Case: Chevron Corp. v. Donziger, (2d Cir. Aug. 8, 2016).