A lawyer for Chevron told the 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals in New York that Steven Donziger, a US lawyer who represented a group of Ecuadorians that sued the oil giant, pursued a case "shot through with fraud."

"What happened here was a fraud on the Ecuadorian courts," Theodore Olson, Chevron's lawyer, said.

Olson asked the three-judge panel to uphold a ban on Donziger profiting from the case and from the attorney or villagers enforcing the judgment in the United States.

But