Unocal Trial on Myanmar Pipeline Opens

Lawyers for Myanmar villagers suing Unocal Corp. over alleged human rights abuses committed during construction of its Yadana pipeline told a judge Tuesday that the oil giant, and not its subsidiaries, should pay for the villagers’ injuries.

The El Segundo-based oil firm went on trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court in two closely watched cases that have been delayed for seven years.

In the first part of the two-phase trial, Judge Victoria Chaney will decide whether the 15 villagers can sue Unocal rather than the subsidiaries that invested in the $1.2-billion pipeline from the Andaman Sea to Thailand.

The villagers’ attorneys set out to prove Tuesday that Unocal set up a series of shell companies to shield itself from liability stemming from the Myanmar military’s abuses of the villagers, who allegedly were forced into labor to build the 254-mile natural gas pipeline.

To allow the parent company to escape blame for the alleged murders, rapes and torture perpetrated by the military on the villagers and their families would deny the plaintiffs justice, attorney Terry Collingsworth said in his opening statement.

“The plaintiffs sued the right parties because the Unocal parents are responsible for what happened to them.... This is not about who you collect from, it’s about whose responsibility this is,” Collingsworth told Chaney.

In his hourlong opening statement, Unocal attorney Daniel Petrocelli disputed the plaintiffs’ claims that the subsidiaries had no assets, officers, addresses and phone numbers or bank accounts of their own, and simply funneled any money they collected to Unocal.

Petrocelli accused the villager-plaintiffs of being “hand-picked” by American activists who orchestrated the lawsuits to pressure Unocal to withdraw from Myanmar. The lawyer also said they targeted the parent firm rather than its lesser-known subsidiaries to make a political statement.

“If they are right that these [abuses] occurred ... and that they could not assign any responsibility to these rogue soldiers, you sue those companies directly involved,” he said. “There is no legal basis to go up the chain to Unocal to get paid when you can get paid by the companies involved.”

If Chaney rules that the subsidiaries acted as Unocal’s alter ego in the pipeline project, a California jury will hear the villagers’ allegations of human rights abuses in the trial’s second phase.

Chaney was expected to hear about nine days’ worth of testimony and render a decision in mid-January.