Goli Innocent 
A court in London on Monday overturned an arbitration award that would have required Nigeria to pay the whooping sum of $11 billion over a failed gas project secured through fraud.
The High Court ruling by Justice Robin Knowles reverses the award to the British Virgin Islands-based Process & Industrial Developments Ltd. over the 2010 gas deal. The payment would have dealt a massive blow to Nigeria’s ailing economy.
The judge said although he did not accept all of Nigeria’s allegations discrediting P&ID and the contract, “the awards (of the contract) were obtained by fraud … and the way in which they were procured was contrary to public policy.”
“The awards (of the contract) were obtained by fraud… and the way in which they were procured was contrary to public policy,” the court stated, despite the fact that he did not accept all of Nigeria’s claims invalidating P&ID and the contract.
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Three things, according to Knowles, demonstrated the case’s “irregularity”: P&ID presenting false evidence in a witness statement, the business bribing or paying a corrupt official in Nigeria, and the business “improperly retaining” a legal document from Nigeria that it was given during arbitration.
The compensation award, originally valued at $6.6 billion but now projected to be worth $11 billion with accumulated interest, was won by P&ID in 2017. Loss of earnings for the 20 years covered by the agreement was the company’s primary arbitration claim.
In 2010, the company signed a contract with the Nigerian government to construct a gas processing plant in Calabar, a port city in the southeast.
Shortly after it was signed, the project failed, and P&ID sued the Nigerian government in arbitration, claiming they had been breached.
According to Nigerian officials, the contract was signed under dubious circumstances when deputy president Goodluck Jonathan was serving as acting president and late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua was in serious condition.
P&ID was accused by officials of corruption and bribery in order to secure the agreement and in the arbitration, both of which the business contested.
