By Roger Parloff, senior editor
Editor's note: The following is a web-only companion story to "Have you got a piece of this lawsuit?" from Fortune's June 13th, 2011 issue.
Judge Nicolas Zambrano shows the lawsuit files at his office in the Lago Agrio Courthouse January 25, 2011.
FORTUNE -- Ordinarily, an allegation that plaintiffs lawyers may have been clandestinely involved in the writing of a judge's $18.2 billion ruling in favor of their clients would be getting a lot of attention. But in the environmental case against Chevron taking place in Lago Agrio, Ecuador, it's hard to raise eyebrows anymore.
That is the latest disturbing allegation that's been leveled in this monumentally troubled lawsuit.
This is the case that seeks to hold the oil giant liable for damage to the Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest and its inhabitants from Texaco's oil drilling there between 1964 to 1990. Chevron (CVX), which acquired Texaco in 2001, maintains that, among other things, Texaco settled its Ecuadorian environmental issues in 1998.
Many readers are probably thinking that they read about this scandal last year. But that was actually a different scandal. That was the one in which the Lago Agrio plaintiffs lawyers allegedly ghostwrote a key evidentiary report that was then passed off as the work of Richard Cabrera, a purportedly independent court-appointed expert, to Ecuadorian and U.S. courts, government officials, and media. That alleged scheme stretched from early 2007 until mid-2010, when Chevron finally went to federal court in Denver and pried English-language drafts of key portions of the so-called Cabrera report out of the files of the plaintiffs' U.S. consulting firm. This March U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan found "ample evidence" that certain Lago Agrio plaintiffs lawyers, including lead U.S. counsel Steven Donziger, had, in fact, perpetrated a scheme to ghostwrite "all or much of" the Cabrera report. For that and other reasons Kaplan entered a preliminary injunction barring the Lago Agrio lawyers from enforcing the judgment outside Ecuador. That ruling is now on appeal. More
In this excerpt from Tell to Win, entertainment mogul Peter Guber describes how it took a former president and a lot of fast talking to get permission to film underwater in Havana Harbor.
Fidel Castro
By Peter Guber, contributor
Have you ever been in the audience when a speaker who's lost his or her audience just keeps going with the prepared remarks? Do you remember how that made you feel as a MORE
Mar 11, 2011 1:43 PM ET
In this excerpt from The Asylum: The Renegades Who Hijacked the World's Oil Market, Leah McGrath Goodman witnesses a NYMEX energy trader hazing ritual and watches Bill O'Reilly uncover how those traders set the price of a barrel of oil.
Floor of the NYMEX
By Leah McGrath Goodman, contributor
It was dawn when I received my first of many after-hours phone calls from Mark Bradley Fisher, otherwise known as the Fish. A MORE
Mar 9, 2011 11:56 AM ET
Most billionaires joining Warren Buffett's Giving Pledge are penning pledge letters, explaining their motivations. Here are highlights from the recent class.
By Anne VanderMey, reporter
Frequency chart (by size) of words used in The Giving Pledge letters
What do Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, real estate baron and failed senate candidate Jeff Greene and Wall Street mogul Carl Icahn have in common?
If you said they're very rich, you're right. But that's MORE
Jan 3, 2011 12:47 PM ET
Anti-fracking posters dot towns where exploration companies have leased land to drill for natural gas. (Image by arimoore via Flickr)
A special series from Fortune
Natural gas has quickly and quietly grown to become a major source of energy for the United States, thanks to a controversial technique called fracking. As Fortune writes:
The number of horizontal drilling [or fracking] rigs skyrocketed from 40 in the 1990s to over 500 in 2008. MORE
Oct 1, 2010 2:40 PM ET
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