Nigeria's UK court bid starts to overturn $11 billion damages bill over failed gas project
Royal Courts of Justice
Lawyers representing Nigeria told London's High Court on Monday that the West African nation was the victim of "a campaign of bribery and deception" over a collapsed gas processing project. Nigeria's appeal against an $11 billion damages bill got underway.
The case is related to a contract for a gas project, which was given to a company called Process and Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID) by Nigeria in 2010. However, the project just remained on paper and never broke ground.
The reasons behind the facility never getting materialised are disputed. The contract was inked by Nigerian government officials with Michael Quinn and his business partner Brendan Cahill. It was aimed at converting Nigeria's vast reserves of natural gas into power.
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Quinn and Cahill's offshore company P&ID started arbitration proceedings against Nigeria for breach of contract in 2012, and in 2017 it was awarded $6.6 billion in damages for lost profits. News agency Reuters reported that with interest, that has now swelled to over $11 billion.
The lawyers representing Nigeria in the London court have claimed that bribes were paid to senior officials at its Ministry of Petroleum Resources so that P&ID could get the contractin 2010.
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The lawyers have also said that P&ID bribed Nigeria's legal representatives when it took the nation to arbitration for breaching the contract. They claimed that the representatives didn't even defend the case properly.
Mark Howard, who is representing Nigeria, told London's High Court that P&ID obtained its contract "by telling repeated lies and paying bribes to officials".
P&ID allegedly paid bribes to "corrupted" Nigeria's lawyers to obtain confidential documents during the arbitration, Howard said at the start of an eight-week trial.
Howard also said that P&ID paid bribes and relied on false evidence "to dupe (Nigeria), the tribunal and this court into giving P&ID an extraordinary amount of money on the back of a campaign of bribery, corruption and deception".
Meanwhile, in written submissions to the court, P&ID denied that it paid bribes to get the contract.
(With inputs from agencies)
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