Ecuadoran villagers can seek to enforce in Canada a multibillion-dollar Ecuadoran judgement against US oil giant Chevron Corp on pollution in the Amazon rainforest, Canada’s top court said on Friday.
However, the decision only establishes jurisdiction and does not settle the claim itself.
Chevron’s Canadian subsidiary dismissed the ruling, calling the Ecuadoran judgement fraudulent and unenforceable.
However, a lawyer for the villagers vowed to go after Chevron’s Canadian assets, which he said were worth US$15 billion.
“We are going to pursue Chevron’s assets in Canada and in the pertinent courts, until the last cent of the award is paid,” Pablo Fajardo said at a news conference in Quito.
In Canada and in parallel legal fights in the US and Brazil, the indigenous people of Ecuador’s Lago Agrio region have sought to collect compensation for the mass dumping of oil field waste between the 1970s and 1990s, after an Ecuadoran court ordered Chevron to pay US$9.5 billion in damages.
The environmental destruction was allegedly committed by Texaco Inc, which Chevron bought in 2001.
The villagers had asked the Ontario Superior Court to force Chevron to hand over C$12 billion (US$9.04 billion) in Canadian assets held by subsidiaries.
The court turned them down, but they won on appeal.
The oil company has refused to pay, alleging fraud and bribery was used to obtain the ruling in Ecuador and maintains that its Canadian subsidiaries are wholly independent and are completely unrelated with the case.
In March last year, a US court ruled that the Ecuadoran judgement was the product of “fraud and racketeering” and was unenforceable in the US.
In its decision on Friday, the Canadian Supreme Court said “Chevron Canada has a physical office in Ontario, where it was served.”
“Its business activities at this office are sustained; it has representatives who provide services to customers in the province. Canadian courts have found that jurisdiction exists in such circumstances,” the court said.
However, it added that “a finding of jurisdiction does nothing more than afford the plaintiffs the opportunity to seek recognition and enforcement of the Ecuadoran judgement.”
Thousands of villagers in the polluted area say they were sickened and that many have cancer from the contamination of their water supply from the oil spillage.
Chevron contends that Texaco paid all of the required cleanup costs before leaving the country in the 1990s.
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