Buhari: My Intervention Saved Nigeria From Losing One-Third Of Its Foreign Reserves To P&ID

Former President Muhammadu Buhari has recalled how his intervention saved Nigeria from losing one-third of its foreign reserves, approximately USD 15 billion, to Process & Industrial Development (P&ID) in a recently resolved arbitration dispute.

Buhari, in an opinion article titled “A Matter of Principle” on Sunday, revisited the role he, his late former Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari; and ex-Attorney-General, Abubakar Malami, played in preventing Nigeria from suffering the huge loss.

According to Buhari, Nigeria would have been unable to build new schools, train nurses, repair roads or award contracts if it had lost the lawsuit to P&ID.

The Federal Government under Buhari had challenged the arbitration award granted against it to P&ID in 2017. It resulted from a contract won by the company to build a gas processing plant in Cross Rivers State but which ran into problems.

With interest, the judgment debt had grown from $6.6 billion to over US$11 billion.

But on Monday, Justice Robin Knowles of the Business and Property Court in London upturned the judgment, thereby halting enforcement of the arbitration award in favour of P&ID.

The court found that the award had been obtained by fraud, as the Judge concluded that P&ID obtained the award only by “practising the most severe abuses of the arbitral process”.

Reacting in his opinion piece, Buhari recalled that the P&ID case which began before he assumed office in 2015, “would have cost our people close to USD15 billion” adding “We won, and all decent people can sleep easier as a result.”

Buhari said he was determined to get Nigeria a fair hearing, and as such tasked the late Kyari and Malami with getting to the root of the case and securing a favourable outcome for Nigeria.

“Nigeria was in court in London, trying to talk down liability and costs. Back at home, fixers were looking to work out a quiet settlement. This is often the way. A lot of contracts end up in dispute. P&ID won a settlement in 2017 of USD6 billion, with compound interest. People, including out of work ex-British Cabinet Minister Priti Patel, were queuing up to insist we paid, or risk Nigeria becoming an untrustworthy trade pariah.

“Working with a number of different agencies and senior officials of government, we began to find a huge amount of evidence, not all of which Justice Knowles was to accept. But he agreed that P&ID had paid bribes. He agreed that one of P&ID’s founders had committed perjury. And he agreed that P&ID had somehow found in its possession a steady supply of Nigeria’s privileged internal legal documents, outlining our plans, strategies and problems.

“My own view is that this whole, sorry affair shows how important it is to follow the legal process in resolving a dispute. It shows that given time and opportunity for each side to present their case, the temple of justice can satisfactorily resolve all disputes without resort to extra-judicial measures. It was definitely worth the struggle: this was an attempted heist of historic proportions, an attempt to steal from the treasury a third of Nigeria’s foreign reserves,” the ex-president wrote.

Concluding, Buhari urged Nigerians to learn from the P&ID case on the need for transparency in government contracts and called for stricter punishments for corrupt government officials who collude with foreign criminals to defraud the country.