A local firm, Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Limited associated with General Theophilus Danjuma has surfaced to be part of the deal in which Process and Industrial Development (P&ID) is taking pound of flesh from Nigeria over a botched gas monetization contract.

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According to agency reports, Tita-Kuru Petrochemicals Limited owned by Gen TY Danjuma which was never mentioned in the saga has come up to exact penal recompense from P&ID over a claimed abuse of its design which it claims was appropriated in the P&ID contract with federal government.

Disclosure of the involvement of Tita-Kuru with the controversial P&ID which won financial penalty award against the Nigerian government came at a court in London over misappropriation of a concept design.

It is not clear whether the Tita-Kuru arbitration targets part of the financial awards against Nigeria whose concessionary oil block awards transformed TY Danjuma from a retired military General to oil billionaire.

Dispute activated in 2017 when a UK tribunal ordered Nigeria’s government to pay P&ID princely $6.6 billion in damages in contract breaches after the government of President Muhammadu Buhari terminated a gas supply deal awarded by his predecessor, former President Goodluck Jonathan.

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Nigeria has battled unsuccessfully to vacate the court order and associated financial liability to P&ID. And lawyers of the company calculate the current value of the award at $11 billion following accumulation of interests.

It was reported in February hearing of the case that Danjuma’s 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.

“P&ID firmly denies that it unlawfully misappropriated anything from Tita-Kuru,” the company’s majority shareholder, Seamus Andrew, said by email, declining to comment further 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 Nigeria’s anti-corruption agency that P&ID presented work that cost Tita-Kuru $40 million to win its deal with the government. Nigeria repeated that argument in July to a UK court, where it seeks to overturn the multibillion-dollar arbitration award that P&ID won five years ago.

President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration is now preparing for a London trial in January, during which it will try and prove that P&ID secured the gas-supply contract and arbitration award through bribes and lies.

P&ID denies all allegations of wrongdoing and accuses the government of evading its legal obligation to pay it compensation.

While P&ID was entitled to use the design work paid for by Tita-Kuru for the facility it intended to build under the contract with the state, most of the plans ultimately were “not required,” the company said in its response to the government’s allegations in September.

Nigeria’s Attorney General Abubakar Malami said in a witness statement in June 2020 that an earlier settlement struck between Tita-Kuru and P&ID “may have involved” the ex-minister “receiving the right to some form of equity stake” in P&ID and therefore an interest in the company enforcing the award.