Former British home secretary Priti Patel has been slammed by Private Eye magazine for her deafening silence since Nigeria won its bid to overturn an $11bn bill for a failed oil bid.
Private Eye is an investigative journalism bi-weekly in the UK and wrote in its current edition: Back in 2018, for reasons she never explained, Priti Patel, former home secretary and development minister, and at the time backbench MP, took it upon herself to take up the cause of Process & Industrial Developments, a British Virgin Islands-registered company.
P&ID was in dispute with Nigeria over an energy project that had never got off the drawing board. Behind closed doors, it had persuaded an arbitration court in London, in a case that Nigeria had barely contested, that it was owed over $9bn – all money it said it might have made over 20 years, plus interest…
The Nigerian government refused to settle and challenged the decision. Patel then challenged Nigeria in the London-based City AM newspaper: “Nigeria must seriously tackle corruption, rather than use it as a smokescreen. It must honour its obligations to companies like P&ID. Until then, investors inevitably will be very wary of investing in Nigeria.”
Last month a high court judge in London, Robin Knowles, agreed with Nigeria instead of Patel, stating the contract awards to P&ID “were obtained by fraud”.
Nigeria wins bid to overturn $11 billion bill for collapsed gas deal
According to Private Eye: The judge warned that Nigeria’s case exposed vulnerabilities in the highly lucrative – and opaque – commercial arbitration industry Patel had celebrated: but for a prodigious effort by Nigeria and some fundamental errors by P&ID, a company with barely any staff that had never broken ground might have come close to bankrupting one of the already poorest and most unequal countries in the world.
Justice Knowles’ judgment highlighted the large amounts of money that seemed to change hands between a range of officials, contracts and lawyers in Nigeria, but drew special attention to the conduct of two of P&ID’s key players, English lawyers Seamus Andrew (who stood to make £3bn from the award), and Trevor Burke, KC, whose stake stood at a more modest £850m. Knowles determined that they had both made false statements under oath, and called their role in P&ID’s handling of Nigeria’s privileged documents ‘indefensible’.
And there was plenty for Patel and others piling into messy legal disputes to digest from Justice Knowles’ conclusion: ‘This case has, sadly, brought together a combination of examples of what some individuals do for money. Driven by greed and prepared to use corruption; giving no thought to what their enrichment would mean in terms of harm to others’.
Patel was sacked as development minister in 2017 after she held several secret meetings with Israeli officials and a lobbyist without her civil servants being present – as was required by the rules. Such clandestine meetings and her backing of Brexit could possibly fall under Justice Knowles’ pertinent words of “being driven by greed and prepared to use corruption, giving no thought to what their enrichment would mean in terms of harm to others”.
