Nigerian authorities cooked up fictitious allegations in a politically motivated campaign to dodge a massive $11 billion (€10 billion) arbitration award, a hedge-fund backed firm has claimed at a London trial over the legality of the disputed payout.
Process & Industrial Development Ltd (P&ID), founded by Irish investors Michael Quinn and Brendan Cahill and now jointly owned by a British lawyer’s litigation funding firm and VR Capital Group Ltd, said in filings prepared for the trial that Nigeria has a society “where the rule of law is patchy, and that authorities imprisoned people close to P&ID” in “shocking conditions to pressure them into false confessions”.
“This litigation is just one part of Federal Republic of Nigeria’s relentless, politically motivated campaign to destroy P&ID and anyone and anything associated with it,” the company’s lawyers said in the filing. Nigeria’s “case is manifestly false”, they added.
The firm’s response follows Nigerian authorities’ allegations that P&ID bribed government officials in Nigeria to secure a 20-year free gas supply contract in 2010. After the deal failed, P&ID started an arbitration case and bribed lawyers in Nigeria to collude with the company to win a $6.6 billion award for lost profits in January 2017, the country’s lawyers have alleged.
The amount has now swelled to $11.1 billion, including interest, and is about a third of the forex reserves of the largest economy in Africa. If the firm, which has been backed by the hedge fund since late 2017, wins the case and can continue efforts to enforce the award, the liability could increase the cost for the government of raising money on international capital markets and put its overseas assets at risk of seizure.
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“There are many documents that are as close to a smoking gun as one will ever see in a fraud case,” Mark Howard, a lawyer for Nigeria, had said in the high court on Monday. He cited multiple payments by P&ID that were allegedly bribes and chats asking individuals to delete and burn evidence.
A spokesperson for Nigeria and lawyers for P&ID did not immediately respond to emails seeking comments. – Bloomberg
