RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) – Brazilian prosecutors sued Chevron Corp, the No. 2 U.S. oil company, and top offshore oil rig operator Transocean Ltd for 20 billion reais ($10.6 billion) over their alleged roles in a November oil spill near Rio de Janeiro.
The civil suit filed by federal prosecutors in Rio de Janeiro state also seeks to suspend the companies from operating in Brazil, the prosecutor’s office said in a statement on its website on Wednesday, a move that could halt operations of the 10 Transocean offshore drilling rigs operating in the country.
“During investigations the prosecutors found that Chevron and Transocean were not capable of controlling the damages caused by the leakage,” the statement said. “This is evidence of a lack of planning and environmental management by the companies.”
Some legal experts said the action may be a politically motivated suit that could be difficult to win given Brazil’s extensive oil regulations, the case’s technical complexity and the lack of evidence to date of serious negligence or wrongdoing.
The case will add to already-large legal headaches for both companies. Chevron has already faced years of litigation over alleged pollution by Texaco, a company it bought, in Ecuador’s Amazon region decades ago.
Chevron was ordered by Ecuadorean courts in February to pay damages of $18 billion. The suit is now under appeal in Ecuador, and the dispute is also being reviewed by an international arbitration tribunal. Transocean was the rig operator in the giant four-billion-barrel Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010.
The suit could also jeopardize oil companies’ plans to step up their presence in Brazil after the discovery of huge offshore reserves several kilometers (miles) beneath the ocean floor estimated at 50 billion barrels or more.
Reaching that oil will be technically challenging but Brazil expects it will push its crude output to 7 million barrels a day by 2020. That could see it challenge the United States for the rank of world No. 3 oil producer after Russia and Saudi Arabia.
It also risks alarming foreign oil companies eager to expand in one of the world’s fastest-growing oil frontiers, where state-controlled oil company Petrobras accounts for more than 90 percent of the output, and government leaders are moving to assert even greater control of natural resources.
Chevron, which has said it takes full responsibility for the spill, said it has not received any formal notice of the suit and that the spill was staunched in four days with minimal or no damage to the environment.
Transocean had similar comments.
“We have not received a formal notice of this action. At present, our rigs are operating in Brazilian waters and we continue to cooperate with the authorities,” it said in a statement to Reuters.
Chevron shares ended nearly 3 percent lower on Wednesday while Transocean stock fell 3.9 percent, both on the New York Stock Exchange.
“NEW TERRITORY”
“We are really entering new territory here,” said Marilda Rosado De Sa Ribeiro, a lawyer and former official at Brazil’s oil agency, the ANP. “There are high hurdles to make a technical case like this work, but the public prosecutors are professional and serious.”
The government of Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff has been expanding the funding and training of the public prosecutors’ office, helping the prosecutors realize their constitutional role as national watchdog and win more high-profile cases against corruption and environmental wrongdoing, said the lawyer, a partner at Doria, Jacobina, Rosado, Godinho in Rio de Janeiro.
On the other hand Brazil’s legal system allows a large number of appeals and few major cases are settled quickly, meaning that even if successful, Chevron and Transocean could operate for years before facing any fine or sanction.
San Ramon, California-based Chevron has already assumed responsibility for leaking what it estimates at 2,400 barrels of oil into water off the coast of Rio de Janeiro. It has been fined $28 million by environmental authorities for the spill, and its local president has made a public apology before Congress.
The public outrage at Chevron, which did no damage to beaches and has left less than a barrel of oil on the ocean according to Chevron, has led some to suggest the prosecution may be based more on politics than the law.
