Two Nigerians involved with offshore company Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID) would have pocketed about $1.9bn (N1. 535 trillion calculated at official exchange rate of N800 to the dollar) had the record-breaking $11.4bn suit the firm slammed on Nigeria succeeded at an England High Court.

The court had in its verdict, penultimate Monday, dismissed the case instituted by (P&ID).

The two Nigerians, Grace Taiga (now deceased according to the family) and Adetunji Adebayo, were projected to receive $500, 000 and $1.4 billion respectively, according to court documents detailed in a report by Aljazeera.

Taiga was described in the documents as a former Nigerian civil servant whereas Adebayo is said to be the middleman for P&ID during settlement negotiations with the Federal Government.

The third beneficiary, Mohammed Kuchazi, who, as P&ID’s commercial director, assisted the firm in its relationship with the Nigerian petroleum ministry, told the court that he believed himself to be entitled to three percent of the award – some $340m – as per an agreement he said he reached with now-deceased Michael Quinn.

Quinn had co-founded P&ID with Brendan Cahill.

Experts had said the award of $11.4 billion, said to be eight times Nigeria’s 2023 federal health budget, could severely damage Nigeria’s economy had the British court ruled against it.

In January 2017, a London-based arbitration panel had ruled that Nigeria pay $6.6bn to P&ID as compensation for breaching the contract awarded in 2010. That amount then ballooned to $11.4bn with interest. But Nigeria refused to pay, alleging P&ID bribed officials including Taiga to secure the gas contract.

In an eight-week trial that ended in March this year, the government petitioned the High Court to invalidate the arbitration award.

“The negative shock would be monumental if Nigeria were to pay the damages,” Olusegun Vincent, associate professor of finance at Pan-Atlantic University in Lagos State, told Aljazeera, Jazeera ahead of the Monday verdict, pointing to the risk that the government would be unable to pay its debt. “It may take us back to the pre-1999 military era, when Nigeria wasn’t creditworthy”.

‘The P&ID scam’

The scandal began in the late 2000s when the administration of then-President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua planned to address Nigeria’s energy supply crisis by exploiting vast untapped gas reserves in its mineral-rich Niger Delta region.

Seizing the opportunity, P&ID pitched an ambitious project to the petroleum ministry, to build and operate a gas-processing plant near the southern city of Calabar despite having never undertaken a project like that before.

Taiga, head lawyer at Nigeria’s petroleum ministry at the time, was at the centre of negotiations: She worked on the contract wording, recommended to the late Rilwanu Lukman, the petroleum minister then, that he sign a memorandum of understanding with P&ID in 2009, and witnessed his signing of the gas contract the following year.

Under the terms of the agreement, the government would provide wet gas to P&ID for free over 20 years.

The two parties would then split the processed resource, with the government using its share to help power the country’s energy grid.

But the project never got off the ground. P&ID never built the plant and Nigeria never provided the company with any gas. P&ID blamed the government for the failure and convinced an arbitration panel it had been wronged.

The panel awarded the company damages equivalent to the total hypothetical profit the company would have made over the lifespan of the contract – $ 6.6bn plus interest of $1.3m per day from the time the contract was breached.

It was later alleged that Taiga had received close to $10,000 from individuals and companies linked to P&ID ahead of the contract signing. Before the High Court, Taiga, according to Aljazeera, acknowledged having received money but said that these payments were merely gifts from a family friend, P&ID co-founder Quinn.

P&ID said it had done everything in its power to make the project work. However, its inexperience and Taiga’s alleged receipt of undisclosed funds eventually led the Nigerian government to believe that it had been the victim of an elaborate fraud.

Addressing the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, then-President Muhammadu Buhari vowed to confront “the P&ID scam”, which, he said, was “attempting to cheat Nigeria of billions of dollars”.

Anticorruption campaigners seemed to agree with him.

“The story of how a small offshore company with no meaningful track record, no website, and only a handful of employees managed to win a multibillion-dollar gas contract raises red flags for corruption that call for careful scrutiny,” Helen Taylor, senior legal researcher at the British NGO Spotlight on Corruption, had told Al Jazeera.

‘Part of the family’

Taiga, who had previously denied in affidavits that she would receive any money from the award, finally told the High Court under oath on February 16: “I do have expectations.”

Asked by Nigeria’s lawyer how much she expected P&ID co-founder Cahill to share with her, she said: “I did not put my mind on a particular ceiling.”

But in one document dated October 2017, Cahill recorded a “commitment” of $200,000 to Taiga; in another, dated May 2019, the figure was put at $500,000. Al Jazeera, in a report, claimed to have seen both documents which formed part of the evidence before the High Court.

Cahill, an Irish businessman who founded P&ID alongside the now-deceased Quinn, said that these were not firm commitments.

“I sought to reassure her that she would be looked after to some degree,” he told the court. “I didn’t specify how or when.”

In court, Taiga denied having secretly helped Quinn and Cahill when she handled the gas contract at the petroleum ministry. But she added that she now saw herself as “part of the family” that is P&ID.

“It’s remarkable that this Nigerian government official who helped broker the controversial gas deal with P&ID now belongs to the close-knit beneficiaries of this opaque offshore company,” said Taylor.

A billion-dollar promise and ‘lots of uncertainty’

For Adebayo, said to be the Executive Chairman of Nigerian gas company GFD Energy, Cahill wrote, according to court filings alluded to by Aljazeera in its report, that “Mr Adebayo was promised 10 percent of the income from the arbitration” but added that there was still “a lot of uncertainty around the amount, if any, that will be paid out.”

Adebayo did not appear before the High Court.

In his own affidavit, Kuchazi wrote that he had been friends with Lukman, then-minister, since the 1960s. Before entering business, Kuchazi had been a Nigerian politician.

Asked for further comment, Kuchazi’s lawyer, Eric Ifere, told Al Jazeera that his client’s entitlement to “a 3 percent commission” was supported by a written agreement with P&ID. He declined to share that document.

The Nigerian government had accused Adebayo and Kuchazi of having bribed Nigerian officials on P&ID’s behalf. The company and Kuchazi denied the accusations before the High Court.

Adebayo, Taiga, and P&ID, according to the report, did not respond to Al Jazeera’s requests for comment.