Pay for Play: Clinton Appointed Judge Permits Ecuadorian Suit vs Wells Fargo to Proceed

I am sure this is all a big misunderstanding. The good folks over in ceviche-ville would never allow themselves to be paid off, in order to relieve themselves of a hacker, terrorist, fucker — living in their London offices.

Almost immediately after Julian Assange’s internet access was revoked, a Bill Clinton appointed judge ruled that the Ecuadorian cyber-theft lawsuit v Wells Fargo could proceed to trial. While it’s possible that this was going to occur anyway, it’s equally possible that Judge Lewis Kaplan might’ve been inspired to rule against them too.

A lawsuit by an Ecuadorean bank alleging that Wells Fargo & Co (WFC.N) is liable for authorizing the transfer of $12 million stolen in a 2015 cyber heist can go forward, a U.S. judge ruled on Tuesday.

The decision by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan was in response to Wells Fargo’s motion to dismiss the lawsuit by Banco del Austro, which sought to hold the U.S. bank responsible for failing to halt the transfers made via the SWIFT network.

The 2016 lawsuit took on new importance in the wake of this year’s heist at the Bangladesh central bank, in which cyber thieves used the SWIFT global messaging system to swipe $81 million from an account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.

Via Wikipedia

On May 5, 1994, Kaplan was nominated by President Bill Clinton to a seat on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York vacated by Gerard Louis Goettel. He was confirmed by the United States Senate on August 9, 1994, and received his commission on August 10, 1994. He took senior status on February 1, 2011, and was succeeded by Judge Ronnie Abrams.

And there’s just one more minor issue with regards to Judge Kaplan and the government of Ecuador. He was the one who ruled against them in their plight to collect damages from Chevron, for leaving their rain forest in tatters, for the meager sum of $9 billion.

An attorney for a New York City lawyer, Steven Donziger, who was heavily criticized by Kaplan, called the 2nd Circuit decision “unprecedented in American law” and vowed to explore all options on appeal.

“Never before has a U.S. court allowed someone who lost a case in another country to come to the U.S. to attack a foreign court’s damages award,” attorney Deepak Gupta said. “The decision hands well-heeled corporations a template for avoiding legal accountability anywhere in the world. And it throws the entire international judgment enforcement framework out the window.”

It went to appeal and were ‘outgunned on a profound level.’