Chevron has failed to appeal the US Supreme Court's decision to pay $19 billion US in damages to the people of the Lago Agrio region of Ecuador, reports the BBC.
It's the latest in the long drawn out battle between Texaco, which was purchased by Chevron in 2001, and 30,000 Ecuadorean indigenous representatives from the area. The claimants said that Texaco dumped polluting materials into the Ecuadorean region of the Amazon between 1964 and 1992.
The sum originally stood at $8.6 billion in damages, but it was more than doubled in July after Chevron refused to publically apologise. Chevron said that Texaco has already behaved responsibly by spending some $40 million cleaning up the area in the 1990s.
The plantiffs stated that "it is necessary to clarify that no amount will be enough to repair all the crime they did in our area, nor will it be enough to bring the dead back to life."
Ecuador's President Rafael Correa described the dispute as a "David and Goliath" battle. "The harm that Chevron caused to the Amazon cannot be denied."
