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Donziger Must Pay $814K in RICO Fees to Chevron, Court Says

The cost of fraud just went up for Steven Donziger.

A U.S. federal court in New York has ordered Donziger, mastermind of the Ecuadorian racketeering and fraud scheme against Chevron Corp., to pay the company $813,603 for his share of court fees from his 2013 RICO trial.

In a 49-page opinion last week, U.S. District Court Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, who presided over the RICO proceeding, reiterated that “Donziger and his co-conspirators attempted to extort billions of dollars from Chevron” through falsified evidence, bribery, coercion and the ghostwriting of a $19 billion court judgment against the company in Ecuador.

The RICO ruling, which was unanimously affirmed by the U.S. Court of Appeals, granted Chevron the right to recover the costs of the action.

Last Wednesday, the court rejected all Donziger’s arguments for not paying as baseless or unsupported by evidence, adding he was not entitled to favorable court “discretion” due to his “repeated” and “egregious misconduct” and “outrageous behavior” throughout the case.

“Among other things, he willfully, deliberately disregarded a court order to produce relevant documents located in Ecuador but nonetheless under his practical control,” the judge wrote. “He deliberately testified falsely at an evidentiary hearing on Chevron’s motion for sanctions. And he falsely testified that he lacked recollection in response to nearly 300 questions at his deposition in this case and on cross-examination at trial.”

the court found that Donziger and his team in Ecuador:

Blackmailed a judge to abandon judicial inspections and appoint a “global expert;”

Corrupted the “expert,” Richard Cabrera;

Wrote Cabrera’s report;

Falsely passed off Cabrera’s report as the work of an independent, impartial expert;

Ghostwrote former Judge Nicolas Zambrano’s $19 billion judgment “which demonstrably relied on the fraudulent Cabrera report.”