By Enyeribe Anyanwu
Like many other schemes involving Mike Quinn and his fellow compatriots, the $9.6billion arbitral award they won against Nigeria may eventually blow in their
faces. Revelations questioning the genuineness of the contract are emerging in
quick succession. As a result, the quandary in government circles is disappearing,
just as the fear and apprehension on the faces of Nigerians are gradually fading
away. And soon everything may culminate in the entire scheme collapsing like a
pack of cards.
By the time the UK court that gave P&ID the arbitral award against Nigeria
resumes after vacation, it might discover that, like Nigeria, it had been taken for a
big ride by a celebrated late conman. Based on fresh facts Nigeria might present
in its planned appeal, the court might discover that everything had been a
charade, that the court had built something on nothing.
Amidst the uncertainty and public outcry following the judgement of the London
court, some government officials had said Nigeria was considering negotiating
with Process & Industrial Development (P&ID) as one of the options to ameliorate
or avert the looming disaster. But today, Nigeria has ruled out such a negotiation,
declaring that it was not going to lose any of its assets to P&ID as ordered by the
court.
“Despite the recent recognition of the award by a UK court, and contrary to some
reports, Nigeria is not about to lose any of its assets to P&ID. There is no
imminent threat to Nigeria’s assets,” said Lai Mohammed, the Minister of
Information. He went ahead to assure Nigerians that the federal government
“was taking all necessary steps to appeal the decision of the UK Court, to seek for
a Stay of Execution of the decision, to defend its rights and to protect the assets
of the people of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”
Nigeria’s growing confidence emanates from revelations emerging from efforts to
ascertain the genuineness or otherwise of the P&ID contract. Investigations by
the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Nigeria’s economic and
financial crimes watchdog, have so far shown that everything about P&ID: its
profile, activities, operations, board of directors, among others, reeks of fraud.
First and foremost, the EFCC discovered that contrary to P&ID’s claim that the
contract was signed in January 2010, late President Musa Yar’Adua under whose
regime the deal was struck left Nigeria for medical treatment abroad in November
2009, thereby raising question of who negotiated the contract. By that time, the
issue of the Vice-President, Goodluck Jonathan becoming acting President was
raging and he couldn’t have signed the contract.
Again, as stupendous as the contract was, there was no trace or evidence of the
contract being discussed in the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting, as
contracts of such magnitude are usually discussed and approved by the FEC
before signing. Besides, P&ID, it has been discovered, has links with companies,
especially a notorious oil firm which is involved in a lot questionable deals, and
currently has over 20 legal issues to answer.
Furthermore, a member of the board of directors of P&ID, those who would have
benefitted from Nigeria’s misfortune, who had earlier agreed to honour EFCC’s
invitation, later declined and went underground. Other directors of the company
cannot be traced, while their office address in Abuja clearly shows that P&ID has
nothing to do in the building that is being occupied by a law firm.
Reports also show that P&ID has no presence in Odiobo Odukpani, a riverine
community on the outskirts of Calabar where the company claimed it has
negotiated land to site its phantom gas plant. The community leaders have said
that they neither saw anyone coming to inquire about land nor negotiated with
anyone for land for such a project. They also said they had never heard of any
company called Process & Industrial Development or P&ID.
But by far, the greatest revelations that is emboldening Nigeria is a recent
Bloomberg publication. A masterpiece of investigative journalism, the preamble
to the story summarizes the P&ID gas plant scam: A dying Irishman went for one
last big score in Nigeria. The project failed, but a London tribunal says his
company’s owed $9 billion and counting.
The Bloomberg article went ahead to reveal the person of the mastermind of the
huge scam, Michael Quinn and some of his cohorts, the various schemes they had
been involved in in Nigeria before the last ‘big score’, their mode of operations
etc. According to the publication, a close examination of Quinn’s career, drawn
from public records, leaked documents, and interviews with friends and former
associates, shows that P&ID wasn’t the only Quinn project to end in
disappointment, lawsuits, and corruption allegations.
Bloomberg revealed that the liquid gas plant project was not the only deal Quinn
had pulled in Nigeria. “It was just the largest—the one that was supposed to
provide his biggest payday.”
The Bloomberg report showed that the late Quinn started living in Nigeria in the
2000s, made friends with top government officials and political bigwigs, and had a
reputation of short-changing Nigeria in the contracts awarded to him by his
friends and contacts in government.
Some top government officials he became intimate with include former President
Olusegun Obasanjo, his successor, late President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, and
former Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Theophilus Danjuma, who was also a former
Minister of Defence in the Obasanjo administration in 1999.
The report showed that contrary to Quinn’s claim before the court during the
arbitration in the failed gas supply project that he borrowed $40 million in
preparations for the GSPA, it was Danjuma, who claimed the project was his idea
that gave him the money.
According to the report, among the projects the late Quinn was involved with in
Nigeria was a contract to repair and upgrade 36 British-made Scorpion tanks in
Bauchi, in which he played smart by supplying used and faulty parts as well as
equipment.
Quinn had several contracts with the Nigerian Army including one that involved a
contract to supply 4,000 rounds of tanks ammunition. He was also said to have
been involved in a contract scam that led to his being charged with espionage and
handling secret military materials. He was charged along with his son, Adam and
others, including three Nigerian officials.
The long list of his alleged attempts to defraud Nigeria through contracts and
arbitration also includes the $5 million contract he won through one of his
companies, Industrial Consultants, which in 2010 brokered the deal with the
Nigerian Air Force to repair ejector seats in six Alpha Jets, a fleet of small fighter
aircraft for training.
The Nigerian Air Force was reported to have withdrawn from the contract some
months after the deal was sealed for a British company, North Wales Military
Aviation Services Ltd. (NWMAS) to carry out the repair. The dispute for the
botched contract went into arbitration with the Nigerian panel describing the
reasons for the pull out of the air force as “flimsy, untenable and unacceptable…”
The arbitration panel then awarded the British company about $2.3 million for
work allegedly done, plus interest. Meanwhile, the British company used to win
the contract was not aware of the proceedings at the arbitration panel, as it had
been sidelined by Quinn, who had reportedly registered a local company, NWMAS
Nigeria Limited to gyp the company the benefits from the contract.
In addition to the litany of fraudulent deals Quinn was involved in Nigeria, the
Bloomberg report talked of how a man who had worked for Quinn contacted an
American lawyer Nigeria had hired to lead its defence in the US, and told him that
he did not think the contract was not genuine. He told the lawyer that Quinn had
conspired with some Nigerian officials to profit from government projects that
were doomed from the start, and that P&ID was one of at least three such
lawsuits involving Quinn.
All these revelations by Bloomberg have made Nigerian officials upbeat, supplying
the EFCC the tonic it needs to dig deeper in order to establish that the contract
was, in fact, a scam.
For late Quinn and his co-travellers, both foreign and local, that might be the way
the cookie crumbles.