President Bola Tinubu has applauded the landmark judgment by a United Kingdom court which has let Nigeria off the hook over a debilitating $11 billion payout to a firm known as Process & Industry Development (P&ID) Ltd.
Judge Robin Knowles sided with Nigeria while giving judgment to set aside the $6.6 billion arbitrary judgment against Nigeria of which the interests has skyrocketed to $11.5 billion, won by briefcase company — Process & Industry Development (P&ID) Ltd.
It is over a failed 2010 deal to develop a gas processing plant in Nigeria.
Ajuri Ngelale the Presidential spokesman, in a statement obtained by Persecondnews on Monday, said “Nigeria will no longer be held hostage by economic conspiracies between private firms and solitarily corrupt officials who conspire to extort and indebt that very nation they swear to defend and protect.”
He said: “Today’s victory is not for Nigeria alone. It is a victory for our long-exploited continent and for the developing world at large, which has for too long been on the receiving end of unjust economic malpractice and overt exploitation.
“Nigeria is appreciative of the tremendous efforts of the defense team and acknowledges the role of the Federal Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Attorney-General in the process of defending Nigeria’s interest in this case.”
Nigeria has been enmeshed in a fight with Process & Industrial Developments after the company was awarded a 20-year contract in 2010 to construct and operate a gas processing plant in southern Nigeria.
In the aftermath of the collapsed deal, 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 claimed 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&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.
Judge Robin Knowles allowed Nigeria’s challenge in a written ruling on Monday.
“I have not accepted all of Nigeria’s allegations,” the judge said in his ruling but 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”.
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