Nigeria avoids paying $11 billion judgement debt over failed gas deal

Nigeria’s government dodged having to payout as much as $11 billion after a London judge ruled that the arbitration award over a failed gas deal, handed to a hedge-fund backed firm was won fraudulently.

The judge found that the massive arbitration award in favor of hedge fund-backed Process & Industrial Development Ltd. was tainted by bribes. “The awards were obtained by fraud,” judge Robin Knowles said in a ruling on Monday.

The case highlights “what some individuals will do for money,” the judge said. “Driven by greed and prepared to use corruption; giving no thought to what their enrichment would mean in terms of harm for others. Others that in the present case include the people of Nigeria.”

The ruling, which can be appealed in the UK, will come as some relief to Africa’s biggest crude producer’s economy that’s fighting double digit inflation and falling oil revenues. An adverse ruling could have added a debilitating liability on the country, where over the past eight years debt has increased almost eight-fold to more than $110 billion.

Spokespeople for Nigeria and lawyers for P&ID and its founders didn’t immediately respond to emails seeking comments.

At the heart of the case is a failed 2010 gas deal between Nigeria and P&ID, a British Virgin Islands-registered firm founded by two Irish businessmen. A resulting arbitration led to a $6.6 billion award for P&ID that’s now swelled to over $11 billion with interest.

Nigeria alleged “bribery of epic and industrial scale” first for the gas deal and then to buy off lawyers representing the country to win the arbitration award in 2017. “Nobody who sat through the factual evidence could have missed the stench of corruption,” the country’s lawyer Mark Howard had said during the trial in March.

Not all of Nigeria’s allegation were accepted by the court, the judge said. The African nation was, however, successful in showing irregularity in the award that can pave the way for the court to declare the award will have no effect.

Richard Deitz-led hedge fund VR Capital Group Ltd., two lawyers in the UK, P&ID’s founder, and two missing witnesses were among those who stood to gain billions of dollars if P&ID had won and got paid out in full.

“We completely deny that there was any corruption,” David Wolfson, P&ID’s lawyer, previously said. Nigeria came up with fabricated evidence to lay a “forensic trap” for the court to rule against the award.