A company that was awarded more than nine billion dollars in an arbitration case against Nigeria has been ordered by a court in the capital city of Abuja to forfeit its local assets to the government.
The order comes after two men linked to the company, Process & Industrial Developments (P&ID), pleaded guilty to charges of fraud and tax evasion on its behalf, the court said on Thursday.
The impact on the British Virgin Islands-based firm and its international arbitration award, now worth some 20 percent of Nigeria's foreign reserves, was not immediately clear.
Nigeria's Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) brought 11 individual charges against P&ID and its local subsidiary. The two men, Muhammad Kuchazi and Adamu Usman, plead guilty to all the charges on behalf of the company.
The men, both Nigerians, were not personally charged and freely left the court.
In a statement, P&ID said the EFCC investigation had not afforded basic human rights to those involved and called on the government to "accept its responsibilities under the law."
"None of the individuals involved are current employees or representatives of P&ID," the spokesman said. "P&ID itself has received no communication from any Nigerian authority about the investigation or today's hearing. There has been no evidence produced, no defence allowed, no charges laid, no due process followed," it said.
The EFCC described Kuchazi as commercial director and Usman as director of the company's local subsidiary.
The men could not immediately be reached for comment.
P&ID was set up to execute a 2010 deal with the Nigerian government to build and operate a gas-processing plant in the southeastern port city of Calabar. When the deal collapsed, P&ID took the government to arbitration, eventually winning a $6.6bn award that has been accruing interest since 2013.
Last month, a judge in London said he would grant P&ID the right to convert the award to a judgment, which would allow it to seek to seize assets from the Nigerian government to collect the award.
The government has said the deal was designed to fail and called the award "an assault on every Nigerian and unfair."
The ruling in Abuja would not necessarily affect P&ID's efforts to seize assets. A Lagos court ordered in 2016 that the entire arbitration be set aside, but the arbitration tribunal rejected the court's jurisdiction to rule on the matter - a decision affirmed by last month's London ruling.
With interest payments, the arbitration award now tops nine billion dollars.
Al Jazeera
Friday, September 20, 2019
Thursday, September 19, 2019
Video - The effect of Saudi oil refinery crisis on Nigeria
As unfortunate as the attacks on Saudi Arabia's oil facilities might be, for some oil producing countries, it's an opportunity to ramp up production and take advantage of the current global spike in price of oil. It's especially so for oil producers in Africa, whose national budgets have been threatened by low oil prices.
Video - Nigeria-South Africa ties date way back to the 60's
Nigeria and South Africa's relations date way back to the 1960's during the Apartheid era. Nigeria reportedly contributed Millions of Dollars as relief funds for victims and to help fight against Apartheid in South Africa until its liberation in 1994. Perhaps it is this historical reason that makes the Nigerian anger especially strong.
Video of Nigerian solidiers roasting suspect goes viral
Some Nigerians have expressed anger at a clip showing three soldiers torturing a man suspected to have committed an offence. While the date of the video could not be ascertained as of the time of this report, the military men could be heard speaking a mix of Hausa and pidgin English.
What the suspect did was not stated in the 30-second clip. The video, posted on Twitter, shows the soldiers hitting the suspect, as one of them strike him with the butt of his gun. The men tie the suspect up and hang him on an iron bar, as he dangles under a burning fire.
He has heavy logs of wood on his head, back and leg to steady him on the flame. “You must feel it now now now,” one of the soldiers said. “Leave am like this…” “Don’t hit him o…” another said, as his colleague hit him with the butt of the gun. “Make I kill am?”
The poster of the video said she could not tell the suspect’s offence. However, Nigerians, who watched the video, called the attention of the Nigerian military to it, demanding immediate investigation. One Daniel, @ayoadaniel, said, “Has the Nigerian military seen this video and please, there should be no denial that these aren’t our soldiers.
Even in war times, rules of engagement aren’t just thrown out of the window like that; this is wrong on so many levels.” Another Twitter user, Dat Fulani Boi, said the soldiers were on their own. “For your information, the Nigerian army does not in any way teach this kind of inhuman punishment to the soldiers. They just do it on their own free will.
And I urge the Nigerian army to look into this. He may be a criminal, but he can be punished secretly and privately,” he wrote.
Some of the people who commented said the suspect might be a Boko Haram terrorist, adding that the torture was justified going by the pains they had caused many families.
A Twitter user, @BonnylifeUche, however, described the act as inhumane, saying there could be no justification for it.
“We’re all against terrorists and terrorism, but this inhumane torture of a captured terrorist by Nigerian military is unacceptable and stand condemned,” he wrote.
The acting Director, Army Public Relations, Sagir Musa, said he was not aware of the video.
Punch
Nigeria becomes staging ground for illegal pangolin trade
In a rubble-strewn storage lot in the sprawling Nigerian port city of Lagos, customs agents crack open a shipping container crammed with scales from pangolins, a shy mammal prized in Asia for its use in medicines.
The scales being stored with elephant tusks in the fetid container are part of a growing haul of pangolin cargos seized in Nigeria, a country that is now the main hub for gangs sending African pangolins to Asia, according to law enforcement officials, non-governmental organisations and wildlife experts.
They say porous borders, lax law enforcement, corruption and one of the continent’s biggest ports have helped criminal networks in Nigeria corner most of the African trade in pangolins, considered to be the world’s most trafficked mammal.
Ranging in size from a small rabbit to a large dog depending on the species, pangolins are the only mammals with scales. The nocturnal tree-climbers that feed on ants and termites are more closely related to bears than the anteaters they resemble.
This year alone, Hong Kong and Singapore have intercepted three huge shipments of pangolin scales weighing a combined 33.9 tonnes and worth more than $100 million, based on estimates of their value in Singapore.
Each shipment was bigger than any that had come from Africa before this year - and they all came from Nigeria.
According to wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, less than a quarter of major pangolin seizures from Africa came via Nigeria in 2016. By 2018, that had jumped to almost two-thirds and three-quarters of the total weight seized was linked to Nigeria.
“Traffickers like Nigeria more than anywhere else ... they prefer to go there because it makes it easier for them to export,” said Eric Kaba Tah, deputy director of wildlife law enforcement group The Last Great Ape Organization in Cameroon.
“The situation for pangolins is becoming more and more serious and even more dangerous,” said Tah, who has helped crack down on the trade in Cameroon, one of the other main pangolin trafficking routes to Asia.
Other African countries known for pangolin trafficking such as Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda all say they have clamped down on the illicit trade as well - pushing pangolin traffickers towards Nigeria instead.
‘TOO MANY FRONTS’
Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in some Asian markets and the pangolin’s hard keratin scales - the stuff of human fingernails and rhino horns - are dried, ground into powder, and used in medicines in China to treat ailments such as poor lactation, sores and rheumatism.
Demand for African pangolins in countries such as China and Vietnam has been growing as the number of Asian pangolins has dwindled over the years, to the point where two of the four Asian species are now on the critically endangered list.
The other two are endangered and all four African species of pangolin were classed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature when all commercial trade in pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, was banned in 2016.
“At the rate at which pangolins are being traded and poached, it could take two decades for the mammal to be extinct,” said Ray Jansen, chairman of the African Pangolin Working Group in Pretoria.
Nigerian customs officials disagree with the idea their country has become a pangolin trading hub. Assistant Comptroller Mutalib Sule argues that pangolin trafficking through the West African country is on the decline.
“There is tight effort at the borders to ensure that such things do not come in again,” he said, adding that no country had been able to stamp out smuggling altogether.
According to customs officials in Nigeria, agents seized 927 kg of pangolin goods in 2016, 402 kg in 2017, and then seizures rocketed to 12.3 tonnes in 2018.
“Sometimes Nigeria is just a point of convergence,” said Sule.
Oliver Stolpe, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) representative for Nigeria, said the problem was that pangolin trafficking was just one in a long list of criminal activities facing the authorities in the West African country.
“Nigeria is fighting crime on so many fronts,” Stolpe said. “It’s simply too many fronts.”
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Experts say it’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from data about seizures. A surge in interceptions could just mean law enforcement agencies were doing their job better, rather than there being a major increase in trafficking.
But TRAFFIC’s Sone Nnoke said the sheer number of seizures of pangolin products that have come via Nigeria points to the country now being the main hub for the illegal trade.
“Because of porous borders it’s very easy to take those products to Nigeria,” said Nnoke.
Jansen at the African Pangolin Working Group said seizures very likely only represent about 10% of the actual trade in pangolin scales so the surge in intercepted cargos from Africa was a worrying trend.
According to TRAFFIC, which tracks seizures of more than half a tonne, 67.6 tonnes of pangolin scales from Africa have been seized throughout the world this year, already almost double the amount in 2018.
The Tikki Hywood Foundation, which rescues pangolins in Zimbabwe and Cameroon, estimates 1,666 of smaller white-bellied pangolins need to be killed for one tonne of scales. When it comes to the giant pangolin, that drops to 277 animals.
So the 67.6 tonnes of scales from Africa seized this year and tracked by TRAFFIC would have needed anywhere from 18,725 to 112,620 pangolins to be killed, depending on the species.
‘HUGE AMOUNTS’
The economic motivation for smugglers is strong. In Nigeria, a whole pangolin can sell for as little as $7. But once in China or Vietnam, the scales from one animal alone can fetch $250, according to UNODC.
Yet Nigeria is not just a staging ground where pangolin parts from around Africa are amassed before being shipped to Asia. The country has its own population of the furtive creatures, living mainly in the thick forests of the southwest.
Here, generations of families have hunted, traded and made medicine from “akika”, the Yoruba name for pangolins.
Many of the traders, particularly those dealing in animals hunted in the surrounding forests, said foreigners they believed to be Chinese were buying pangolins or their parts in ever greater quantities.
“They pay huge amounts of money,” said Agbetuya Babatope Samuel, a traditional healer and trader in the town of Akure in Ondo state. “When I get their money I laugh to the bank,” he said. “I wish it would continue for a long time.”
The high demand is taking its toll.
When the sun has set, Sule Ayinla stalks the dark, thick forests of Ondo Akoko in southwest Nigeria for pangolins, a torch fixed to his head. Hearing a rustle, he fires his long-barrelled gun at a tree, to no avail.
“We used to hunt pangolin here,” Ayinla said, lowering his weapon. Taught to hunt by his father, he said the trade was getting tougher and it was becoming rare to find pangolins hiding in the trees where they typically find cover.
“There used to be lots of animals in this forest but they are scarce now.”
By Paul Carsten
Reuters
The scales being stored with elephant tusks in the fetid container are part of a growing haul of pangolin cargos seized in Nigeria, a country that is now the main hub for gangs sending African pangolins to Asia, according to law enforcement officials, non-governmental organisations and wildlife experts.
They say porous borders, lax law enforcement, corruption and one of the continent’s biggest ports have helped criminal networks in Nigeria corner most of the African trade in pangolins, considered to be the world’s most trafficked mammal.
Ranging in size from a small rabbit to a large dog depending on the species, pangolins are the only mammals with scales. The nocturnal tree-climbers that feed on ants and termites are more closely related to bears than the anteaters they resemble.
This year alone, Hong Kong and Singapore have intercepted three huge shipments of pangolin scales weighing a combined 33.9 tonnes and worth more than $100 million, based on estimates of their value in Singapore.
Each shipment was bigger than any that had come from Africa before this year - and they all came from Nigeria.
According to wildlife trade watchdog TRAFFIC, less than a quarter of major pangolin seizures from Africa came via Nigeria in 2016. By 2018, that had jumped to almost two-thirds and three-quarters of the total weight seized was linked to Nigeria.
“Traffickers like Nigeria more than anywhere else ... they prefer to go there because it makes it easier for them to export,” said Eric Kaba Tah, deputy director of wildlife law enforcement group The Last Great Ape Organization in Cameroon.
“The situation for pangolins is becoming more and more serious and even more dangerous,” said Tah, who has helped crack down on the trade in Cameroon, one of the other main pangolin trafficking routes to Asia.
Other African countries known for pangolin trafficking such as Kenya, South Africa, Tanzania and Uganda all say they have clamped down on the illicit trade as well - pushing pangolin traffickers towards Nigeria instead.
‘TOO MANY FRONTS’
Pangolin meat is considered a delicacy in some Asian markets and the pangolin’s hard keratin scales - the stuff of human fingernails and rhino horns - are dried, ground into powder, and used in medicines in China to treat ailments such as poor lactation, sores and rheumatism.
Demand for African pangolins in countries such as China and Vietnam has been growing as the number of Asian pangolins has dwindled over the years, to the point where two of the four Asian species are now on the critically endangered list.
The other two are endangered and all four African species of pangolin were classed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature when all commercial trade in pangolins, also known as scaly anteaters, was banned in 2016.
“At the rate at which pangolins are being traded and poached, it could take two decades for the mammal to be extinct,” said Ray Jansen, chairman of the African Pangolin Working Group in Pretoria.
Nigerian customs officials disagree with the idea their country has become a pangolin trading hub. Assistant Comptroller Mutalib Sule argues that pangolin trafficking through the West African country is on the decline.
“There is tight effort at the borders to ensure that such things do not come in again,” he said, adding that no country had been able to stamp out smuggling altogether.
According to customs officials in Nigeria, agents seized 927 kg of pangolin goods in 2016, 402 kg in 2017, and then seizures rocketed to 12.3 tonnes in 2018.
“Sometimes Nigeria is just a point of convergence,” said Sule.
Oliver Stolpe, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) representative for Nigeria, said the problem was that pangolin trafficking was just one in a long list of criminal activities facing the authorities in the West African country.
“Nigeria is fighting crime on so many fronts,” Stolpe said. “It’s simply too many fronts.”
TIP OF THE ICEBERG
Experts say it’s hard to draw definitive conclusions from data about seizures. A surge in interceptions could just mean law enforcement agencies were doing their job better, rather than there being a major increase in trafficking.
But TRAFFIC’s Sone Nnoke said the sheer number of seizures of pangolin products that have come via Nigeria points to the country now being the main hub for the illegal trade.
“Because of porous borders it’s very easy to take those products to Nigeria,” said Nnoke.
Jansen at the African Pangolin Working Group said seizures very likely only represent about 10% of the actual trade in pangolin scales so the surge in intercepted cargos from Africa was a worrying trend.
According to TRAFFIC, which tracks seizures of more than half a tonne, 67.6 tonnes of pangolin scales from Africa have been seized throughout the world this year, already almost double the amount in 2018.
The Tikki Hywood Foundation, which rescues pangolins in Zimbabwe and Cameroon, estimates 1,666 of smaller white-bellied pangolins need to be killed for one tonne of scales. When it comes to the giant pangolin, that drops to 277 animals.
So the 67.6 tonnes of scales from Africa seized this year and tracked by TRAFFIC would have needed anywhere from 18,725 to 112,620 pangolins to be killed, depending on the species.
‘HUGE AMOUNTS’
The economic motivation for smugglers is strong. In Nigeria, a whole pangolin can sell for as little as $7. But once in China or Vietnam, the scales from one animal alone can fetch $250, according to UNODC.
Yet Nigeria is not just a staging ground where pangolin parts from around Africa are amassed before being shipped to Asia. The country has its own population of the furtive creatures, living mainly in the thick forests of the southwest.
Here, generations of families have hunted, traded and made medicine from “akika”, the Yoruba name for pangolins.
Many of the traders, particularly those dealing in animals hunted in the surrounding forests, said foreigners they believed to be Chinese were buying pangolins or their parts in ever greater quantities.
“They pay huge amounts of money,” said Agbetuya Babatope Samuel, a traditional healer and trader in the town of Akure in Ondo state. “When I get their money I laugh to the bank,” he said. “I wish it would continue for a long time.”
The high demand is taking its toll.
When the sun has set, Sule Ayinla stalks the dark, thick forests of Ondo Akoko in southwest Nigeria for pangolins, a torch fixed to his head. Hearing a rustle, he fires his long-barrelled gun at a tree, to no avail.
“We used to hunt pangolin here,” Ayinla said, lowering his weapon. Taught to hunt by his father, he said the trade was getting tougher and it was becoming rare to find pangolins hiding in the trees where they typically find cover.
“There used to be lots of animals in this forest but they are scarce now.”
By Paul Carsten
Reuters
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