The West African country was on the hook for the sum \u2013 representing around a third of its foreign exchange reserves \u2013 after a little-known British Virgin Islands-based company took Nigeria to arbitration over the deal.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
After the deal collapsed, P&ID took Nigeria to arbitration in London and in 2017 was awarded $6.6 billion for lost profits \u2013 a sum which has swelled with interest to over $11 billion, representing ten times the country’s 2019 health budget.<\/p>\n
ALSO READ:\u00a0Nigeria expects $10 billion in forex inflows in weeks, says Finance Minister<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n However, Nigeria’s lawyers say the country was the victim of “a campaign of bribery and deception” by P&ID, which they say paid bribes to senior officials to obtain the contract and then corrupted the country’s lawyers to obtain confidential documents during the arbitration.<\/p>\n Judge Robin Knowles allowed Nigeria’s challenge in a written ruling on Monday.<\/p>\n “I have not accepted all of Nigeria’s allegations,” the judge said in his ruling.<\/p>\n But he added that the arbitration awards “were obtained by fraud and the awards were, and the way in which they were procured was, contrary to public policy”.<\/p>\n Recalled in 2020, a UK judge had lauded the timely observation and interventions of Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, SAN, then as Nigeria’s Vice President, saying he was instrumental in how the P&ID case became known and identified as a fraudulent endeavour.<\/p>\n Citing a review of the court record, Sir Ross Cranston of the UK High Court of Justice Queen\u2019s Bench Division Commercial Court explained that the Vice President was a regular fixture throughout the review process under the Buhari administration.<\/p>\n He noted that it was Prof. Osinbajo’s alarm in his \u201cFraud on the nation\u201d statement in June 2018, that turned the case against P&ID in Nigeria\u2019s favour.<\/p>\n \n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Nigeria has won its bid to overturn an $11 billion damages bill for a collapsed gas processing project it said was procured by a concerted campaign of bribery. This was ascertained as the court sitting […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15243,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,3,2],"tags":[41,2840],"coauthors":[25],"class_list":{"0":"post-15241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"category-latest-news","9":"category-top-news","10":"tag-nigeria","11":"tag-pid"},"yoast_head":"\n