Nigeria’s Attorney General has vowed to protect the country from a US$9bn arbitration claim over a failed gas project. The case centres on a deal signed in 2009 between the company Process and Industrial Developments (P&ID), registered in the British Virgin Islands, and the Ministry of Petroleum Resources of Nigeria for the construction of a gas processing plant to convert “wet,” or unrefined, gas into “lean gas” in Calabar, in the Cross River State (south-eastern Nigeria), instead of flaring it. Under the agreement, the country promised to construct a gas pipeline that would have supplied the facility but that was never completed. Work on the plant never started, but P&ID said it spent US$40m on the project, a claim questioned by the Nigerian government.
An arbitration tribunal in UK awarded the firm US$6.6bn in damages in January 2017, based on what P&ID could have earned from a 20-year operation of its project. In August 2019, the Commercial Court of London allowed P&ID to start seizing US$9bn, including interests, in assets from the Nigerian government over the gas project. Once the court issues a ruling, P&ID could start targeting assets such as real estate, bank accounts or any kind of moveable wealth. However, it must prove the property is unrelated to Nigeria’s operations as a sovereign state.