Yesterday the UK Supreme Court unanimously found that P&ID, the small offshore company that tried to use arbitration proceedings to extort over $11 billion from Nigeria, must pay a hefty costs order of up to £44 million against them in pounds sterling, rather than Nigerian naira.
The costs order arose from the shocking 2023 trial in the Commercial Court which found that P&ID paid bribes in the process of procuring gas contracts with Nigeria and then “practised the most severe abuses of the arbitral process” in order to obtain eye-watering arbitration awards worth billions of pounds.
The High Court ruling not only set aside the arbitration awards obtained by fraud, but shone a light on the vulnerabilities of the arbitration process to abuse by bad actors wanting to conceal fraud and corruption from public scrutiny.
Yesterday the apex court outright rejected P&ID’s argument that the legal costs claimed by Nigeria – which could be up to £44.2 million excluding interest – should be paid in naira to avoid the West African country making a windfall from advantageous conversion rates. This affirmed the approach taken by the High Court and Court of Appeal.
While this judgment draws this chapter on costs to a close, the fallout from the extraordinary events which preceded it is ongoing.
In its landmark 2023 ruling, the High Court found that Trevor Burke KC and Seamus Andrews, two London-based lawyers who acted for P&ID, made an “indefensible decision” to retain Nigeria’s internal documents, which they knew included privileged documents that they were not entitled to see.
The judge highlighted the sums of up to £850 million and £3 billion that they were respectively due to receive personally in the event of P&ID’s success which, he stated, informed their behaviour. A copy of this judgment was referred by the judge to the Bar Standards Board and Solicitors Regulation Authority in the case of both legal professionals.
It is deeply concerning that two years on, neither regulator appears to have taken action on this. With the dust now settled on the cost currency question, we have our eyes peeled for further developments to ensure these lawyers are called to account for their role in this corruption scandal.
