Environmentalists seem to realize that they have some stake in a fight such as the Ecuador-Chevron lawsuit...But what about fights between multinational oil giants and the governments of oil-producing states over control of resources?
"We have to get out of ICSID" proclaims Hugo Chavez Frias during ´Hello, President´ on the 8th of January 2012. To understand why, let´s recap. States are sovereign. A state cannot be judged by other states or organisms, because it has jurisdictional immunity, which is inalienable. To hand that over is to loose sovereignty
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez returned to his weekly talk show programme last night, after his cancer diagnosis in June last year caused it to be cancelled for over seven months. On the show Chavez argued that the claim brought by Exxon against Venezuela's PDVSA was "about imperialism".
In the latest showdown between western oil companies and Venezuela’s populist president, Exxon Mobil is widely seen as the loser, after the Paris-based International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) ruled that the world’s biggest oil company would not be entitled to most of the damages it demanded after its fields were nationalised.
The Venezuelan government has described its arbitration hearing at the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) as a “successful defence” after it was told to pay just US$907 million to the Texas-based oil company Exxon in return for the nationalisation of one of its projects in Venezuela.
