QUITO, Ecuador – An Ecuadorean judge ruled Monday in an epic environmental case that Chevron Corp. was responsible for oil drilling contamination in a wide swath of Ecuador's northern jungle and ordered the oil giant to pay $9.5 billion in damages and cleanup costs.
The amount — $8.6 billion plus a legally mandated 10 percent reparations fee — was far below the $27.3 billion award recommended by a court-appointed expert but appeared to be the highest damage award ever issued in an environmental lawsuit.
But whether the plaintiffs — including indigenous groups who say their hunting and fishing grounds in Amazon River headwaters were decimated by toxic wastewater that also raised the cancer rate — can collect remains to be seen.
In a statement, Chevron called the decision "illegitimate and unenforceable" and said it would appeal. It has long contended it could never get a fair trial in Ecuador and has removed all assets from this politically volatile Andean country, whose leftist president, Rafael Correa, had voiced support for the plaintiffs.
Chevron, which earned $19.1 billion last year, said it did not believe the judgment "enforceable in any court that observes the rule of law."
Company spokesman Kent Robertson told The Associated Press that "the evidence of fraud on the part of the plaintiffs' lawyers is overwhelming."
"We intend to see that the perpetrators of this fraud are held accounable for their misconduct," he added in an e-mail exchange.
The marathon, high-stakes case, fraught with corporate espionage and geopolitical intrigue, has been winding its way through U.S. and Ecuadorean courts for more than 17 years but has in recent years turned into an unusually acrimonious legal slugfest.
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