A British lawyer representing Nigeria in a London court case in which $11 billion is at stake has said, on Friday, that the trial would reveal corruption “on an industrial scale”, not only of Nigerian officials but also of British lawyers.
The case stems from a contract for a gas project awarded by Nigeria in 2010 to Process and Industrial Developments Limited, P&ID.
The gas processing facility never materialised, for reasons that are disputed. After years of legal wrangling, a London-based arbitration tribunal said, in 2017, that Nigeria had not fulfilled its side of the contract and should pay P&ID $6.6 billion in compensation.
With interest, the award is now worth $11 billion. That sum represents close to 30 percent of Nigeria’s foreign exchange reserves, which stood at $37 billion at the end of November.
Recall that the Federal Government has gone to court in London arguing that P&ID obtained the original contract through bribery and used the arbitration proceedings as a means of extorting a huge sum of money from Nigerian public coffers.
P&ID denies this and says Nigeria is trying to get out of paying what it owes. An 8-week trial is due to start in January at the High Court in London, with witnesses appearing in person as well as remotely from Ireland and Nigeria.
At a pre-trial review on Friday, the lawyer representing Nigeria, Mark Howard, told the court that evidence of “widespread corruption and bribery on an industrial scale” would be put forward. “Our case is: it was bribery to get the contract, ongoing bribery to keep everyone on board, bribery of lawyers,”, the lawyer said, alleging that two London-based British lawyers previously involved in the case had committed “serious misconduct”.
P&ID was originally established by two Irish nationals. Ownership of the firm has since passed to two Cayman Islands-based entities. The case has become a cause célèbre for the Nigerian government, with President Muhammadu Buhari denouncing it during a speech to the United Nations in 2019, calling it a scam designed to cheat Nigeria out of billions of dollars.
Buhari was in opposition at the time the contract was awarded.
