Mogadishu-KNN-A British judge has ordered the Nigerian government to pay $9bn in assets to a small private company.
The firm, P&ID, had reached a deal with the Nigerian government in 2010 to build a natural gas plant – but the deal fell through two years later.
P&ID then sued the government for failing to provide the gas or install the pipelines it had promised to build.
The firm was first awarded $6.6bn (£5.4bn) in 2017, but the London court has now added $2.4bn in interest.
According to the firm’s website, the deal would have allowed it to “build a state-of-the-art gas processing plant to refine natural gas…[that] Nigeria would receive free of charge to power its national electric grid”.
The firm said it had accrued interest of $1.2m a day as a result of the collapsed deal, but the government’s legal team said this was “manifestly excessive and penal”, AFP reported.
The final amount of more than $9bn is equivalent to about 20% of Nigeria’s declared foreign reserves of $45bn.
The government also told the Commercial Court in London that English courts did not have the authority to rule on the dispute.
