In big-time liability litigation, it’s usually the plaintiffs’ lawyers who investigate where corporate targets might be hiding potential sources of pecuniary recovery—off-shore accounts, obscure insurance polices, and so forth.
There’s nothing typical, though, about the epic Chevron pollution litigation in Ecuador. So in this case, it’s Chevron that’s poking around in Gibraltar, of all places, trying to figure out how the plaintiffs’ lawyers plan to channel any recovery they may receive into an obscure shell company far from the sullied Ecuadorian rain forest.