Chevron told to pay 17 billion dollars for polluting Amazon water

Chevron vowed on Monday to fight a multi-billion-dollar judgment issued by an Ecuadorian court that held the second-largest US oil company accountable for polluting the Amazon rainforest.

"The Ecuadorian court's judgment is illegitimate and unenforceable," said Chevron in a press release. "It is the product of fraud and is contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence."

A judge in Lago Agrio, a provincial capital near the Colombian border, on Monday ordered Chevron to pay an 8.6-billion-dollar fine and an equal amount in punitive damages stemming from environmental pollution dating back to the 1960s. The ruling was made as a result of an 18-year-old lawsuit alleging that Texaco Inc. dumped chemical-laden wastewater in the Amazon River basin from 1964 to 1992. Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001. Environmentalists praised the court's decision.

"[Monday's] ruling in Ecuador against Chevron proves overwhelmingly that the oil giant is responsible for billions of gallons of highly toxic waste sludge deliberately dumped into local streams and rivers, which thousands depend on for drinking, bathing and fishing," said Amazon Watch in a press release.

But analysts also believe the ruling is unenforceable. Chevron doesn't have any refineries, storage terminals, oil wells or other properties in Ecuador that could be seized to pressure the company to pay, Mark Gilman, an analyst at Benchmark Co. LLC in New York, told Bloomberg.