P&ID: Fmr. Lagos AG, Shasore’s Payment Of US$100,000 To Adelore & Oguine Being Public Servants, “Prima Facie Case Of Dishonesty” In The Arbitration—UK Court

Today, 4 September 2020, Sir Ross Cranston of the UK High Court of Justice Queen’s Bench Division Commercial Court, came down hard on Mr Supo Shasore, one-time justice commissioner in Lagos State who first handled the case of P&ID for Nigeria.

Below is Cranston’s verdict on him, word for word:

“The reason was that he had colluded with P&ID, with the inevitable result that Nigeria would lose the case”, Howard [Nigerian lawyer] said.

”In advancing his case, Mr Howard pointed to various factors: Mr Shasore had advised a speedy settlement, as in his 17 July 2013 letter to the then Attorney General, without investigating the obvious line of defence that P&ID, a BVI company with no experience, assets or finance, would not perform.

“Next, Mr Shasore concealed his involvement from his own firm.

“Further, in the conduct of the arbitration, he did not seek disclosure of any of the 100 files Mr Quinn referred to in his statement, relevant to the preparatory work P&ID was said to have performed.

“Finally, there was no useful evidence on the Nigerian side in Mr Oguine’s witness statement, which he drafted.

“It was significant, Mr Howard submitted, that in the arbitration proceedings Mr Shasore failed to challenge Mr Quinn’s evidence of P&ID’s ability and willingness to perform the contract and the US$40 million said to have been expended.

“His attempt at cross-examination of Mr Quinn was bound to fail when he had not challenged anything significant in Mr Quinn’s statement, the issue of cross-examination was foreclosed at the case management hearing in which he participated, and Mr Quinn was dead (which he claimed not to know).

“Then there were Mr Shasore’s reply submissions, added Mr Howard, where he wrongly asserted that his statement of disputed facts essentially challenged all the facts in Mr Quinn’s statement.

“Additionally, Mr Shasore dragged his feet when conduct of the arbitration was transferred from the Ministry to the Attorney General for the quantum stage. At the quantum stage, Mr Howard submitted, Nigeria’s new counsel, Mr Ayorinde, was precluded from reopening the matter.

“Not only did he not know of Mr Shasore’s behaviour, he had no basis to apply to reopen the Tribunal’s prior findings”, Howard concluded.

“Through Mr Shasore Nigeria advanced what would have been a knock-out blow with its challenge on jurisdiction with an argument which even the Attorney General, Mr Malami, thought was a good one.

“That was entirely inconsistent with the suggestion, said Mr Mill, that Mr Shasore was somehow conspiring with P&ID and putting up a sham defence for the sake of appearances.

“There was no evidence, submitted Mr Mill, to support Mr Howard’s speculation that Mr Shasore might have been corrupted, if not from the outset of the arbitration, certainly after the Jurisdiction Award.

“The reality was, Mr Mill contended, that this was a genuine dispute which, given the language of the GSPA, Nigeria was hard-pressed to defend, but which it fought over a number of years from its inception in August 2012 until the Final Award in January 2017. Mr Shasore’s conduct, and the Nigerian defence generally, were inconsistent with a deliberate plan to lose the case.

” As to the liability hearing, submitted Mr Mill, Mr Shasore tried his hardest – having misapprehended the implications of Procedural Order No. 9, and the discussion at the case management conference – to get himself out of a hole. By reference to the transcript and the Tribunal’s reasons, Mr Mill also submitted that there was nothing to prevent Mr Ayorinde from reopening the matter at the quantum stage of the arbitration.

“At one level I can see that in Mr Shasore’s favour it might be said that he did the best he could in circumstances where he had a difficult case and, at least for part of the time, faced a lack of instructions from the Ministry (as I have mentioned above). Albeit he did not seek discovery, he did advance the jurisdiction argument, and at the liability stage identified at short notice six facts in Mr Quinn’s statement which Nigeria wished to dispute (albeit that P&ID did not need to rely on them).

“Moreover, it might be said that Mr Shasore took a number of points on liability, although the Tribunal dismissed them without too much difficulty. Whatever the cause it seemed to follow as a matter of course that at both the liability and quantum stage the Tribunal would accept Mr Quinn’s evidence as to the willingness and ability of P&ID to perform its part of the GSPA. As Mr Mill put it, Mr Shasore faced the timeless problem of advocates dealt a poor hand and making the best they could.

However, what persuades me of a prima facie case of dishonesty in Mr Shasore’s conduct of the arbitration are his payments of US$100,000 each to Ms Adelore and Mr Oguine. Ms Adelore occupied Ms Taiga’s position at the Ministry as the senior lawyer, and Mr Oguine was her counterpart at the NNPC. Their salaries as public servants, according to the Attorney General, Mr Malami, were some US$5000 per annum.

“Mr Mill submitted that these payments had nothing to do with P&ID. Moreover, Mr Shasore had volunteered the information about them to the EFCC and described them as gifts.

“The argument that Mr Shasore volunteered the payments goes nowhere, since once the EFCC had information from the bank accounts it was difficult to deny them. As to Mr Shasore’s account that these were gifts, that does not seem to me a complete and honest explanation for why he should make these payments to these senior public servants.

“Part of the picture is that after the payment to Ms Adelore, she wrote to the Ministry’s permanent secretary on 30 December 2014 recommending a settlement. We also saw that when the EFCC investigated in the first part of 2016, she was the source of information at the Ministry. I have also mentioned that Mr Oguine was charged with producing witnesses for Nigeria but instead put his name to a witness statement in May 2015 which the Tribun