The Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear an appeal from the Ecuadorian government in a case involving a $96 million arbitration award for Chevron Corp.
Ecuador was appealing an August ruling from the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, which upheld a 2011 decision for Chevron from the The Hague, Reuters reports.
{mosads}The justices declined to consider the case, ending one component of an ongoing legal struggle between Ecuador and the oil giant.
The case involves contracts Ecuador issued to Texaco Petroleum Inc. in the 1990s to develop oil fields in the country. Texaco sued Ecuador for violating the contracts, and when Chevron acquired Texaco in 2001, it accused Ecuador of dragging out litigation between the company and the country.
The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration ruled in Chevron’s favor in 2011, and the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision last August. With interest, the award has increased to $106 million, and a Chevron spokesman told Reuters that Ecuador “will be held accountable” after the Supreme Court rejected its appeal.
Chevron and Ecuador have long fought over the fate of billions of dollars in damages an Ecuadorian court ordered Chevron pay for contamination of rainforest land in the country.
A New York judge in 2014 blocked that judgement, and Chevron CEO John Watson told Bloomberg News last month, “We continue to fight that. Thus far, we’ve been very successful. There’s risk, but we’ve been able to manage it.”