The judge of the Commercial Court of England & Wales, Justice Robin Knowles, last week saved Nigeria from becoming a victim of a monumental financial scam to the tune of $11 billion (approximately N13 trillion), or half of the country's proposed 2024 budget. If the ruling had gone in favour of the crooks, the Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID) company and its Nigerian collaborators, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), would have lost assets worth a huge amount in Europe or America. However, after a diligent examination of the evidence Nigeria adduced against the scammers' devices, the Commercial Court warded off the plot to further drain the country's emaciated financial resources.
The P&ID failed scam was another chapter in the voluminous book containing the sad stories of how Nigeria's top civil servants, brief-case wielding elite, lawyers, accountants, and those who have access to the country's checkbook have used the so-called Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects to steal huge sums of money from the treasury in the name of finding solutions to the country's besetting problems. In this case, the scammers penetrated the bureaucracy through Nigeria's electricity crisis, which has gulped billions of dollars but produced few results. The P&ID promoters posed as the solution to the power crisis and got some shadowy civil servants to sign a gas supply and processing agreement in 2010, during the period that the late President Umaru Musa Yar'Adua was hospitalised. The company was to process natural gas for powering electricity to the tune of 2,000 megawatts on the national grid.
Like many other PPP projects awarded to companies that could not execute brilliantly articulated projects on excellently produced proposals, the P&ID did not have the capital or even the capacity to generate or process natural gas, at least, of that magnitude. As observed by Justice Knowles, Nigerians who collaborated with P&ID were blinded by greed and not the interest of the Nigerian public who have, over the years, been let down "in so many ways over the history of this matter by some individuals in politics and administration whose duty it was to serve and protect them."
Though the majority of Nigerians celebrated the failure of the plot by the foreign firm to defraud the nation, there are some dubious Nigerians who collaborated with them at various levels. First, when the previous government of President Muhammadu Buhari became aware of the suit at the International Arbitration Court in London in 2017, it reviewed the contract and discovered that the deal was signed in the dark and that the Public Procurement Process may not have been followed. Some relevant and top officials of the Yar'Adua government, like his Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Michael Aondoakaa, SAN, Chief Economic Adviser, Tanimu Yakubu, and the Director General of the Bureau of Public Procurement, Emeka Ezeh, feigned ignorance about the deal. How did officials of the supervisory ministry seal the contract without the involvement of relevant government officials?
We understand that the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), under its former chairman, Ibrahim Magu, had launched an investigation into the fraud and some persons had been fingered. Those found culpable must be prosecuted. However, it is not just the promoters of the fraud who should be brought to book; even those involved in the scandalously sloppy defence of Nigeria's case against the P&ID must not be spared. The $11 billion awarded P&ID earlier included the so-called $9.6 billion profit the company should have made over a period of the 20-year contract and some $3 billion interest on that amount. Such a claim was possible due to the indolence in the character of officials in the Ministry of Justice. If the contract had been terminated in 2012, why did the ministry fail to follow up with all the necessary legal actions to forestall moves by the P&ID to go to the International Arbitration Court? It took five years, from 2012 to 2017, when it was obvious Nigeria was going to lose the case, for government to jerk up from its slumber to defend the case.
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In 2020, acquiescing to its failure to engage in a proper defence, the justice ministry advised the government to negotiate a settlement of $400 million and two oil blocks in favour of P&ID! How could a phony company that did not carry out its contractual obligations be paid such a huge amount as compensation? It took the greed of the P&ID, which insisted on a $2 billion settlement, to halt the payment of the $400 million and the award of two oil blocks. The case had to be appealed to the Commercial Court, where Nigeria defeated the scammers.
This traumatic episode must not be seen as a just lesson. Nigerians who, by omission or commission, facilitated this scam must be brought to book. The prosecution must be in the open, to serve as deterrence to many top civil servants and political elite who become stupendously rich at the expense of our commonwealth. The Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration must scrutinise all future PPP project agreements, to ensure clauses and tiny lines that would expose the country to the kind of P&ID scams are weeded out. Once beaten, twice shy, so the adage goes.
