By M.S Ingawa
The Federal Government of Nigeria has won the legal case against Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID) Limited in a London court on today. The judgment was delivered after five years of legal frameworks which have finally been to the advantage of Nigeria, as the court stroke out the $11 billion arbitration award in favour of P&ID.
Below is brief about the case:
- 13 years ago, 2010, Nigeria signed a Gas Supply and Processing Agreement (GSPA) with P&ID. The agreement was for Nigeria to supply natural gas (wet gas) to P&ID and in turn, P&ID will process and return 85% of the supplied gas to be used for power generation in Nigeria. P&ID agreed to construct two or more sophisticated gas processing plants with ancillary facilities for the wet gas to be processed, a project that was never executed.
- After 2 years of signing the agreement, P&ID suddenly accused FG of not fulfilling it’s end of the agreement (i.e supplying the raw gas) despite not having the processing facility to receive and process the gas. P&ID followed the allegation with court suit demanding for damages in form of lost profit to the tune of about $6.6billion. The company claimed that they have so far invested about $40m on the project and the FG requested for either physical or paper evidence proving their investment. P&ID explained tire.. no evidence.
- P&ID shamefully took legal action against Nigeria and secured arbitral award against us and Nigeria was asked to pay the company a whopping $6.6billion plus pre-judgement (beginning from 2013) and post-judgement interest at 7%. At interest rate of about $1m per day, the award amounted to $11billion. Nigeria then applied for relief of sanctions and extention of time.
- Upon recommendation by the then VP Osibanjo, Nigeria filed for appeal and approached the case from the angle of financial crime. Many crimes were uncovered ranging from the mode and manner of awarding the contract as well as the dubious follow up actions. Ordinarily, contracts of that nature must be approved by FEC and Bureau of Public Procurement. This P&ID contract was only approved and awarded by 2 standing committees in Ministry of Petroleum, just the technical committee and the legal committee. And it was also uncovered by EFCC that most of the committee members were linked with dubious off shore transactions related to P&ID associates that suggest bribery for the signing of the contract.
- Nigerian Legal Team used findings from EFCC on the people involved in the contract signing (committee members) and established that the contract was a fraud and carried out in a dubious manner. The court agreed and granted our prayer, stroke out the arbitral award of $11billion against us.
- Who is P&ID?: P&ID is a shell company based in the British Virgin Islands. It is 75% owned by Lismore Capital Limited, an entity incorporated in the Cayman Islands while the 25% is owned by VR Advisory Services Limited, another powerful international vulture fund. Vulture funds are a well-known type of hedge fund who typically invest in buying the debt of the world’s poorest countries, and then take aggressive action to recover that debt. P&ID was originally set up in 2006. It was co-founded and run by a failed music record producer from Ireland, who had no substantive experience in managing any notable infrastructure projects.
The company had no track record in the oil and gas industry, and no credentials to indicate that it would be capable of carrying out an arrangement as complex as the GSPA.
And Lismore Capital is owned by P&ID’s former lawyer in the arbitration, Mr Seamus Andrew. Mr Andrew’s company bought the stake in P&ID in October 2017, just months after the arbitral tribunal ruled in P&ID’s favour. He joined hands with reckless and heartless Nigerians to cheat on Nigeria and went back to buy shares in preparation to feast on $billions of Nigeria’s money he has not worked for.
