Nigeria Monday resumed a high-stake attempt at London’s High Court to overturn an $11bn arbitration award that left it owing more than a quarter of its foreign reserves to an obscure oil and gas company.
The legal dispute, which has rumbled for more than a decade, centres on a contract that Nigerian government officials struck with Michael Quinn, an Irish former band manager, and his business partner Brendan Cahill, to help the west African country turn its vast reserves of natural gas into power.
The project never broke ground. Quinn and Cahill’s offshore company, Process & Industrial Development, in 2012 began arbitration proceedings against Nigeria for breach of contract. P&ID ultimately won a $6.6bn award from a panel of arbitrators in London, one of the biggest known payouts to a company from a sovereign state.
That bill has risen to $11bn with interest — more than Nigeria’s most recent budget for health, education and justice ministries combined.
Nigeria is now seeking to persuade the High Court that the successful arbitration claim was built on “a massive fraud perpetrated by P&ID” in collusion with former Nigerian government officials. It claimed that the deal was “procured by bribes” and the arbitration “tainted,” in court filings from 2020.
A spokesman for Nigeria’s president declined to comment and the justice ministry did not respond to requests for comment.
“The stakes in this colossal dispute could not be higher for the Nigerian people, who stand to lose the equivalent of nearly a third of the country’s entire budget for 2023 to a small offshore company with opaque ownership structures,” said Helen Taylor, senior legal researcher at anti-corruption group Spotlight on Corruption.
