December 21, 2023:
On 23 October 2023, the High Court
made its landmark decision that the Federal Republic of Nigeria (FRN) had been
successful in its challenge to the US$11 billion arbitration award fraudulently
obtained by an obscure hedge-fund backed BVI shell company Process &
Industrial Developments Ltd (P&ID). At a hearing on Friday 8 December 2023,
the High Court ruled that the award is to be formally set aside.
In a further ruling handed down by
the High Court today, P&ID has been refused permission to appeal, bringing
this matter to a definitive conclusion.
The High Court has also ordered
P&ID to pay Nigeria’s substantial legal costs, including an immediate
interim payment of £20 million within 28 days, recognising the lengths that FRN
has been forced to go to in order to uncover the fraud and successfully set
aside the US$11 billion award, which was found to have been obtained by
P&ID through “the most severe abuses of the arbitral process”. At
the hearing on Friday, the Judge Sir Robin Knowles CBE refused P&ID’s
request to discount 20% of FRN’s costs on the basis that certain of the claims
should not have been brought, ordering instead that FRN was entitled to seek
recovery of 100% of its costs, and stating that he expected FRN’s overall costs
recovery to be “very high”.
A spokesperson for the Federal Republic of Nigeria said:
This decision marks the conclusion
of a historic victory for the people of Nigeria who after more than a decade of
legal action, are now free from the fraud perpetrated by P&ID. With
permission to appeal having been refused, no further recourse is available to
P&ID and so the Nigerian people can have final confirmation that justice
has been served. Today’s decision has drawn a final end to this saga, and will
also serve as an important message to those individuals or entities who would
seek to defraud the people of Nigeria.
This result could not have been
achieved without the tenacity and tireless efforts of the legal team who have
persistently worked to obtain this outcome on behalf of Nigeria – led by
partners Shaistah Akhtar, Andrew Short and Zachary Segal of Mishcon de Reya,
and the English Counsel team led by Mark Howard KC and Philip Riches KC.