23rd October, 2023
Nigeria on Monday won its bid to overturn an $11 billion damages bill claimed by a little known company called Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID).
The British Virgin Islands-based company made crooked claim for a collapsed gas processing project, in which it invested no dime.
Nigeria said the claim was dubious and was procured by a concerted campaign of bribery.
Nigeria was on the hook for the sum – representing around a third of its foreign exchange reserves – after a little-known British Virgin Islands-based company took Nigeria to arbitration over the deal.
Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID) was awarded a 20-year contract in 2010, to construct and operate a gas processing plant in southern Nigeria, as part of a wider plan to exploit Nigeria’s abundant reserves of gas.
After the deal collapsed, P&ID took Nigeria to arbitration in London and in 2017 was awarded $6.6 billion for lost profits – a sum which has swelled with interest to over $11 billion, representing ten times the country’s 2019 health budget.
However, Nigeria’s lawyers said the country was the victim of “a campaign of bribery and deception” by P&ID, which paid bribes to senior officials to obtain the contract and then corrupted the country’s lawyers to obtain confidential documents during the arbitration.
P&ID denied that it procured the contract through bribery or that it corrupted Nigeria’s legal team during the arbitration, blaming the failure of the gas deal and the country’s arbitration defeat on institutional incompetence.