TheCable

Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Limited has sued Process and Industrial Developments (P&ID) for allegedly accusing that the company’s designs are “unlawfully misappropriated” to secure a gas contract in Nigeria.

Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Limited is owned by Theophilius Danjuma, former minister of defense.

Citing previously unreported court documents, Bloomberg reported that Danjuma’s firm, Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Limited, sued the company at the centre of a high-stakes London trial concerning an $11 billion arbitration award over facility designs. 

On January 31, 2017, a United Kingdom tribunal ruled that Nigeria should pay P&ID $6.6 billion as damages, as well as pre-and post-judgment interest at 7 percent.

P&ID had claimed it entered into a contract to build a gas processing plant in Calabar, Cross River state, with the Nigerian government, but that the deal collapsed because the government did not fulfil its own end of the bargain.

The current outstanding amount is estimated at $10 billion from 2013.

The federal government, however, approached the court to establish that the contract was awarded on illegal terms after the British court gave P&ID the go-ahead to seize Nigerian assets worth $9 billion over a 2010 contract.

In September 2022, Nigeria secured a landmark victory in its pursuit to overturn the $10 billion judgment awarded against it.

In the report on Thursday, Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Limited brought its own arbitration claim against P&ID in London in 2020, alleging that its designs had been “unlawfully misappropriated” to secure the gas contract, Nigeria said in a filing to a UK court in February.

“P&ID firmly denies that it unlawfully misappropriated anything from Tita-Kuru,” Seamus Andrew, a company’s majority shareholder, disclosed by email.

Andrew, however, declined further comment on the arbitration because the proceedings are confidential. 

Tita-Kuru and British Virgin Islands-registered P&ID worked together from 2006 on an unsuccessful project to build a gas-processing plant. 

Danjuma’s firm claimed in a 2019 letter sent to the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) that P&ID presented work that cost Tita-Kuru $40 million to win its deal with the government. 

A trial has been scheduled in the United Kingdom in January 2023. 

In 2021, the federal government earmarked N1.1 billion for setting up a task force that will scrutinise contracts similar to the controversial Process and Industrial Development Limited (P&ID) signed by previous administrations.

The ministry of justice made the provision in its 2022 budget.