Lawyer Concedes Mistakes in Chevron Case

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Steven Donziger won a judgment against Chevron.

For the last month, Chevron has presented a parade of witnesses against Steven R. Donziger, the freelance lawyer who has been suing the company for 20 years over pollution of the Ecuadorean Amazon jungle. One after another, the witnesses, including some of his closest allies and financiers who are now estranged from his cause, have testified that Mr. Donziger committed witness tampering and fraud.

To Chevron, the case against Mr. Donziger is nothing less than an effort to uphold the rule of law and prevent him and his allies from benefiting from a multibillion-dollar Ecuadorean judgment that he won in 2011.

But now, in testimony prepared for delivery in court next week, Mr. Donziger is as defiant as ever, even as he acknowledges mistakes. Among those admissions are that he concealed his relationship and payments to a court-appointed expert witness who presented a report to the Ecuadorean court that tried the case.

"I did make errors along the way," he said in a draft of his testimony that he has been preparing the last several days. But he stopped well short of apologizing; instead, he challenged the constitutionality of the case and questioned the fairness of Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of Federal District Court in Manhattan.

"I challenge at the most fundamental level the legitimacy of this proceeding," Mr. Donziger said at the start of a written draft of his testimony, which he is preparing to submit to the court. "We face from Chevron what I believe is the most well-funded corporate retaliation campaign in the history of human rights litigation."

With Mr. Donziger's guidance, Ecuadorean rain forest villagers won a judgment in 2011 of more than $18 billion in a provincial Ecuadorean court against Chevron, a decision that was affirmed this week by Ecuador's highest court, although it reduced the penalties to $9.5 billion.

Chevron has virtually no assets in Ecuador, so lawyers for the Ecuadorean villagers hope to persuade courts in Argentina, Brazil and Canada to confiscate company assets for payment. Chevron hopes that a victory in the nonjury trial in Manhattan will strengthen its argument in foreign courts against enforcing the judgment.

In his prepared testimony, Mr. Donziger repeated his long insistence that Texaco, before it was bought by Chevron, spilled millions of gallons of toxic wastewater into rivers of the Ecuadorean Amazon in the 1970s and '80s and left behind unlined waste pits filled with toxic sludge, badly damaging the lives and culture of several indigenous groups. He cites numerous efforts by Chevron to settle out of court.

Chevron disagrees and has waged a withering counterattack in court. Randy Mastro, a lawyer for Chevron, accused Mr. Donziger of leading a "racketeering enterprise" intended to "coerce a big payday against a big company until the pain went away." If Mr. Donziger is allowed to succeed, Mr. Mastro said, it will jeopardize American corporations' ability to work in many countries with imperfect judicial systems.

Chevron has said that Texaco complied with an agreement it negotiated with the Ecuadorean government to clean up its area of operations, and Texaco's former partner Petroecuador is responsible for pollution that was left behind. The company refuses to pay any damages, contending that Ecuadorean courts, with the prodding of the Ecuadorean president, Rafael Correa, were prejudiced as well as corrupted by Mr. Donziger and his associates.

Mr. Donziger, who graduated from Harvard Law School, has become something of a hero to many environmentalists who praise him for his dogged pursuit of the case.

The trial has so far been dominated by witnesses who have accused Mr. Donziger of a series of ethical shortcomings.

Chevron's star witness has been the former Ecuadorean judge Alberto Guerra, who testified that plaintiffs paid him $1,000 a month to ghostwrite favorable opinions for the presiding judge, Nicolas Zambrano. He also testified that Mr. Zambrano told him that Mr. Donziger and his allies promised to pay Mr. Zambrano $500,000 out of the eventual damages as long as he agreed to a favorable verdict.

Mr. Guerra said Mr. Donziger thanked him for his work in a 2009 meeting at a restaurant in Quito, Ecuador. In his court testimony, Mr. Zambrano denied he took money.

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