Former President Muhammadu Buhari, on Sunday, said the country would have paid $15 billion if it had lost the case against the international firm, Process & Industrial Development Limited.
He lamented that such monetary loss could be substituted to finance key infrastructural projects, among others.
Following a 2010 agreement between P$ID and the Federal Government, the firm pledged to build a gas processing plant in Nigeria.
However, the project never materialised, leading P&ID to sue for lost profits. The firm was granted the sizable award plus accumulated interest, which became a point of contention.
In a ruling on Monday, October 23, Justice Robert Knowles of the Business and Property Court in London held that the process through which P&ID secured the contract was fraudulent.
Reacting to the matter, Buhari recalled that during his administration in 2015, he asked his former Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari, and erstwhile Attorney-General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, to “get us a fair hearing.”
He noted that the firm, owned by Irish intermediaries who understood the systematics of the Nigerian market, won the contract to build a gas processing plant in Cross Rivers State.
“We won, and all decent people can sleep easier as a result. Justice Robin Knowles said Nigeria had been the victim of a monstrous fraud. But it was a close-run thing,” Buhari said.
“But ordinary Nigerians never took the decisions that ended up before Justice Knowles. Had Nigeria lost, it would have required schools not to be built, nurses not to be trained and roads not to repaired, on an epic scale, to pay a handful of contractors, lawyers and their allies – for a project that never broke ground.”
