Chevron faces claims it was responsible for damage in the Amazon rainforest caused by oil extraction by Texaco, a company it bought in 2001. Chevron inherited the lawsuit, which was originally filed in 1993.

"The Ecuadorian court's judgment is illegitimate and unenforceable," Chevron said in a statement. "It is the product of fraud and is contrary to the legitimate scientific evidence."

Pablo Fajardo, lead attorney for the Ecuadoran Amazon communities that sued Chevron, told AFP that the Provincial Court of Justice of Sucumbios made the ruling.

Fajardo described it as slightly more than $8 billion while the Wall Street Journal reported the total is $8.6 billion, more than half of which would go toward restoring polluted soil.

Environmental activists applauded the ruling, which Chevron plans to challenge.

"Chevron has spent the last 18 years waging unprecedented public relations and lobbying campaigns to avoid cleaning up the environmental and public health catastrophe it left in the Amazon rainforest," US-based groups Amazon Watch and Rainforest Action Network said in a statement.

The organizations called the court's decision "historic and unprecedented," saying it was the first time indigenous people have won a lawsuit against a multinational corporation in the country where the damage occurred.

Chevron pledged to appeal, arguing that earlier rulings by US and international courts will bar enforcement of Monday's decision.

"Chevron does not believe that today's judgment is enforceable in any court that observes the rule of law," it said in the statement. "Chevron intends to see that the perpetrators of this fraud are held accountable for their misconduct."

The lawsuit on behalf of Ecuadoran Amazon communities was originally filed in New York in 1993. It sought $27 billion for water and soil damage, as well as for illnesses suffered by local residents.

The Ecuadorans allege that Texaco dumped billions of gallons of toxic waste into the Amazon.

Chevron, the second-largest energy company in the United States, has long claimed that the process was tainted.

In 2009, Chevron posted videos online purporting to show a bribery scheme implicating the judge presiding over the lawsuit. The judge recused himself days after the videos were released.

This award passes the record of $5 billion initially imposed on ExxonMobil Corp. for an oil spill off the coast of Alaska in 1989. But that award was later reduced to $500 million after a series of appeals by Exxon.

Last year, British oil giant BP contributed $20 billion to a compensation fund for cleanup efforts and victims of its massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

The BP disaster, which began April 20, 2010 with a deadly blast aboard the BP-leased Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, sullied the coastline from Texas to Florida, killing wildlife and devastating key local industries such as tourism and fishing.

Chevron closed at $96.95 per share in trading Monday on the New York Stock Exchange, up by $1.22 per share.

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