UK court overturned Nigeria’s $11 billion damages bill for failed gas agreement

A court in the United Kingdom has found in favour of Nigeria and reversed a $11 billion damages bill surrounding the contentious Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID) transaction. Gavel used to depict the tale.

According to Reuters, Nigeria argued that the transaction was for a failed gas processing contract that had been obtained fraudulently through bribery, and the court accepted this claim.

In order to take use of Southern Nigeria’s significant gas reserves, the P&ID was given a 20-year contract in 2010 to build and run a gas processing plant.

Following the collapse of the contract, the British Virgin Islands-based company took Nigeria to court in London in 2017 and won a $6.6 billion award for lost revenues.

The news source stated that the damages cost has risen to over $11 billion due to interest, which accounts for about a third of Nigeria’s foreign exchange reserves.

But the Nigerian government’s attorney maintained that his nation was the victim of “a campaign of bribery and deception” by P&ID, claiming that the business bought the contract by paying bribes to Nigerian officials and bought off the nation’s attorneys to get private documents during the arbitration.

The corporation refuted the accusations of bribery and corruption made against them and attributed institutional inefficiency to the collapse of the gas agreement and the nation’s arbitration loss.

Judge Robin Knowles declared in the verdict on Monday that “I have not accepted all of Nigeria’s allegations” and that the arbitration awards “were procured in a manner that was contrary to public policy and were obtained by fraud.”