The bare-knuckle fight keeps going. An international arbitration panel ordered Ecuador to stop the enforcement of the $18-billion judgment handed down in 2011 by an Ecuadorean court against Chevron for environmental and punitive damages arising from its oil operations in the country's Amazon region.
Convened under the authority of the U.S. Ecuador Bilateral Investment Treaty and administered by the Permanent Court of Arbitration in The Hague, the three-person tribunal ordered El Salvador's judicial, legislative, and executive branches to prevent any enforcement of the multimillion-dollar judgment.
Meanwhile, plaintiffs counsel, the law firm Patton Boggs, sued Chevron in federal court in New Jersey, accusing the company of improperly obtaining a preliminary injunction from U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan last year.
Bringing the suit pro se and in its own name, Patton Boggs claimed that during the six months the injunction was in force, before it was vacated by the Second Circuit, it "choked off [plaintiffs'] ability to obtain funding" that would have allowed them to keep pursuing their case.
