MANHATTAN (CN) - A lawyer whom Chevron has labeled a racketeer asked the Second Circuit today to consider revelations from an international tribunal in which the oil giant's key witness admits to giving false testimony in U.S. federal court.
New York-based attorney Steven Donziger has spent more than a year saddled with a federal judge's findings that he defrauded Chevron in the Ecuadorean rainforest city of Lago Agrio that ended with a $9.5 billion environmental verdict.
More than six months after his appeal, the Second Circuit has not ruled, and counsel for Donziger told the appellate court today that breaking developments "exonerate" their client.
"At the outset, we acknowledge that this motion is a good bit longer and more thorough than the typical judicial-notice motion," Donziger's attorney Deepak Gupta wrote. "But this is an extraordinary case, and these are extraordinary developments. They not only bear on the legal issues in this appeal; they also exonerate Steven Donziger of the allegations of wrongdoing that Chevron has levied against him."
Recent news casts "grave doubt" over U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan's findings that Donziger and his colleagues obtained their award "by corrupt means," Gupta said.
Kaplan's ruling hinged largely upon the testimony of Alberto Guerra, a Lago Agrio judge who testified for Chevron in New York that he ghostwrote the Ecuadorean judgment against it in exchange for bribes.
This past April, Guerra appeared on the stand in a different component of Chevron's multipronged attack against the Ecuadorean ruling - namely, arbitration proceedings that seek to make Ecuador's government foot the bill.
Newly public transcripts of those proceedings at the Washington offices of the World Bank show Guerra changed his story.
Donziger says Guerra's admissions provide one more reason for the Second Circuit to void Kaplan's ruling.
"Guerra's two-day testimony in the [trade] arbitration is littered with explicit admissions of dishonesty, including admissions that he lied while on the stand in New York and in his witness statement," his lawyer Gupta wrote in a 19-page brief.
Long before these revelations, Guerra's credibility was already under scrutiny. Chevron was up front that it paid the judge to testify - $326,000 as of early 2013 - and Judge Kaplan noted various ways Guerra's story shifted over the years.
"Guerra on many occasions has acted deceitfully and broken the law," Kaplan wrote last year. "Some details of his story of what transpired in the [Chevron] case have changed. But that does not necessarily mean that it should be disregarded wholesale."
A year before Chevron added him to its payroll, Guerra had little more than $100 in his bank account, owed tens of thousands of dollars in debt, and could not afford to visit his children and grandchildren living in the United States.
Kaplan found that Chevron's corroborating evidence outweighed Guerra's credibility problems, but Donziger wants the Second Circuit to consider Guerra's recent admission to the contrary.
"Guerra also conceded in his arbitral testimony that there is no evidence (aside from the so-called Memory Aid) corroborating his allegation that the Ecuadorian plaintiffs' lawyers bribed Zambrano and ghostwrote the judgment," the new motion states. The "memory aid" refers to a document Guerra says Donziger's co-counsel Pablo Fajardo provided to help him ghostwrite the judgment.