Nigeria scored a landmark victory on Monday, winning a case to overturn $11 billion in damages for disrupting a gas project, the Nigerian presidency said.
In 2017, a London arbitration tribunal issued a ruling that required the West African nation to pay approximately $6.6 billion in lost profits to P&ID, an engineering company operating in the British Virgin Islands. As of 2023, the total sum owed had skyrocketed to $11 billion, which accounts for roughly one-third of the country's foreign exchange reserves.
Eventually, on Monday, the Business and Property Court in London sided with Nigeria and dismissed the company's claims due to its fraud and bribery.
This legal battle has dragged on since 2012, when P&ID accused the Nigerian government of failing to fulfill its end of the Gas Supply and Processing Agreement signed two years earlier.
Since 2017, the Nigerian government has been appealing to the London court to overturn the ruling that orders them to pay the company. They allege that P&ID bribed senior officials to secure the contract and also bribed the country's lawyers to obtain confidential documents during the arbitration process.
In conclusion, the court discovered that P&ID indeed offered bribes to Grace Taiga, the former legal director in the Nigerian Ministry of Petroleum Resources, both before and after the contract was signed, as well as around the time of the arbitration.
After winning the case, Nigerian President Bola Tinubu hailed the court's ruling, saying that "it is a victory for our long exploited continent and for the developing world at large, which has for too long been on the receiving end of unjust economic malpractice and overt exploitation."
"This landmark judgment proves conclusively that nation states will no longer be held hostage by economic conspiracies between private firms and solitarily corrupt officials who conspire to extort and indebt the very nations they swear to defend and protect," he added.