A London High Court judge Monday granted Nigeria’s request to overturn an award that would have required Nigeria to pay $11 billion over a failed gas project. The judge found that the contract was obtained by fraud.
A key point that helped Nigeria in the case was an investigation conducted by its anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).
In 2010, Process & Industrial Development Ltd (P&ID) won a contract from the Ministry of Petroleum Resources to build a gas-processing plant in Calabar.
Nigeria was to supply the gas for free over 20 years and the two parties would split the processed resources. But Nigeria never provided the promised gas, and the plant was never built.
P&ID sued the Nigerian government for breach of contract at an arbitration tribunal in England. In 2017, P&ID secured the compensation award, which originally was $6.6 billion but is now estimated to be $11 billion with accrued interest. The company’s main claim in the arbitration was for loss of profit for the 20 years the agreement covers.
But as that bitter faceoff was going on in London, the EFCC in 2016, at the request of then Vice President Yemi Osinbajo and President Muhammadu Buhari opened an investigation into P&ID and the controversial contract.
Ibrahim Magu, who was acting head of the EFCC at the time, led the crucial investigation. He was later humiliated out of office in controversial circumstances. The real reason for his removal remains unclear.
The report of an investigation into his tenure, which was masterminded by vested interests, has yet to be made public years after.
The anti-graft agency later indicted Grace Taiga, a former petroleum ministry lawyer for taking bribes related to the P&ID gas contract. It also accused Ms Taiga of corrupt practices and intent to defraud.
The EFCC also established that a now-deceased petroleum minister broke the law by signing the contract without proper approvals and protocol.
Following the law enforcement’s investigations, P&ID was convicted on 19 September 2019 by the Nigerian High Court for various offences relating to tax evasion, money laundering and trading without necessary licences.
This intelligence provided by the EFCC was later filed in court in London. That crucial evidence helped Nigeria overturn the $11 billion award, a payment that would have dealt a massive blow to Nigeria’s ailing economy.
In a court ruling on Monday, Judge Robin Knowles confirmed, based on the EFCC investigation, that P&ID paid bribes to Ms Taiga in connection with the gas contract signed in 2010, and failed to disclose this when it later took Nigeria to court over the collapse of the deal.
Shortly before the gas agreement was entered into, one of co-founders of P&ID, Brendan Cahill, signed a payment instruction dated 29 December 2009 to Bank of Cyprus on Marshpearl letterhead for a transfer of $5,000 to Vera Taiga.
This was described as a “commission payment” on the payment instruction. It is logged in the name of “Grace Taiga” in the associated Excel spreadsheet emailed to Mr Cahill on 1 January 2010.
Then, after the gas contract was signed, on 29 March 2010, Vera Taiga was paid £5,000 by Hobson Industries. The payment instruction was again signed by Mr Cahill. The pdf schedule “Taiga G – Sept 2019” showed this payment against the name “Grace Taiga” and marked with the narrative “Gas Contract”.
“The timing of the payments is highly material, just before and just after the entry into the Gas Supply and Processing Agreement for Accelerated Gas Development (GSPA),” the judge said.
“In authorising the payments Mr Cahill was, I find, acting for P&ID to incentivise and reward Ms Taiga in connection with the entry of the GSPA. They were deliberately kept secret from Nigeria. I am quite satisfied that Nigeria is correct in its allegation that these payments in December 2009 and March 2010 were bribes paid on behalf of P&ID to Mrs Grace Taiga’s benefit in connection with the entry into the GSPA.”
Knowles concluded that the P&ID contracts were “obtained by fraud and how they were procured was contrary to public policy.”
Knowles described the case as an “irregularity”, especially for three reasons — P&ID’s provision of evidence it knew was false, the company’s bribery or corrupt payment to a Nigerian civil servant and the company’s “improper retention” of Nigeria’s legal document which it received during arbitration.
President Bola Tinubu described the judgement as a blow against economic malpractice and the exploitation of Africa.
“This landmark judgement proves conclusively that nation-states will no longer be held hostage by economic conspiracies between private firms and solitarily corrupt officials who conspire to extort and indebt the very nations they swear to defend and protect,” he said in a statement.
As an endnote, Knowles said that although the P&ID case was tainted with bribery and corruption, it also underlines the importance of professional standards and ethics in the work of contract drafting, including in the approach of other parties to the proposed contract.
“It is why some contributions of pro bono work by leading law firms to support some states challenged for resources (this is not to say, one way or the other, that Nigeria is one of those) is so valuable, in the interests of their, often vulnerable, people.”
“In the present case, there were other contracts too, with different counterparties. Their terms and circumstances are not identical, but the overall risk could have been a multiple of the US$11 billion now involved in the present case,” the judge said.