In my post of April 18, I noted that the Lago Agrio plaintiffs had released a report written by Graham Erion, a Canadian lawyer, opining that Chevron had violated the securities laws by failing to make the necessary disclosures to investors regarding the Lago Agrio case. I guessed that “the plaintiffs, via a sympathetic shareholder, may be lobbying the SEC to take regulatory action.”

Prediction confirmed! On May 9, the Unitarian Universalist Association, Zevin Asset Management, and Newground Social Investment, each apparently a Chevron shareholder, asked the SEC and FINRA to investigate “evidence that [Chevron] is violating securities laws by repeatedly making misrepresentations and material omissions regarding its adverse judgment in Ecuador of $18.1 billion for despoiling the environment.”

The SEC’s investigatory process is basically confidential, so I suspect there won’t be any real news about this for some time.