The Ontario Court of Appeal held a two-day hearing on the Lago Agrio plaintiffs’ appeal from the summary judgment in favor of Chevron Canada. The gist of the decision was that the LAPs had not shown they were entitled to pierce the corporate veil and therefore they could not look to the assets of Chevron Canada to satisfy the judgment against Chevron Corp., even assuming the Canadian courts would someday find the Ecuadoran judgment entitled to recognition and enforcement. I gave my basic view on this in a prior post, and in the comments to that post.

I was hoping to have something to report for you on the hearing. How did it go? What can we infer from the oral argument? And so forth. But it turns out that the is no transcript of the hearing, and as far as I know no recording of the argument. I couldn’t get any real comment about the details of how the hearing went from anyone. There are a lot of press releases and op-eds—on the Ecuadoran side, stories about indigenous leaders attending the hearing; on Chevron’s side, columns about preserving the Canadian judiciary’s business-friendly reputation. You can look those up on the web if you like. I’m not going to reprint or summarize them. But it turns out I can’t really report on the hearing itself. So you are going to have to wait until we have a decision to learn more.

All that said: if you have any knowledge of how the argument went that you would like to share, please let me know!