P&ID Fumes Over $11bn Arbitration, Says Bribery Allegations Made By FG To Discredit Gas Supply Contract

Process & Industrial Development Ltd. (P&ID) has said Nigeria wants to dodge the $11bn arbitration award through fictitious allegations.

The lawyers of P$ID said on Tuesday that the allegation of bribery in the course of the deal was politically motivated to discredit the contract.

During a trial in London, the FG and P&ID lawyers argued over the legality of the $11bn awarded the firm.

P&ID is jointly owned by a British lawyer’s firm and VR Capital Group Ltd.

P&ID said in filings for the trial that Nigeria is a society “where the rule of law is patchy” and that the FG imprisoned people who have relationships with P&ID in “shocking conditions”.

The lawyers said the government wants to force them to make a false confession.

“The villain of this case is not my client. Instead, it is the all too familiar story of institutional incompetence and buck-passing,” P&ID’s lawyer David Wolfson said in court.

The Nigerian government had accused P&ID of bribing government officials in Nigeria to win a 20-year gas supply contract in 2010.

Nigeria’s legal team argued that When the contract failed, P&ID started an arbitration case and bribe officials working for President Goodluck Jonathan’s administration and colluded to win a $6.6bn arbitration award for lost profits in January 2017.

The interest on the $6.6bn awarded has risen by $4.4bn making the amount swell to $11.1bn.

Mark Howard, a lawyer for Nigeria said in court that, “There are many documents that are as close to a smoking gun as one will ever see in a fraud case.”

Howard argued there are multiple payments P&ID that were allegedly bribes coded as “dash” and “Dublin expenses”.

He also said there is evidence of chats asking parties involved in the deal to delete and burn evidence.