How I directed Abba Kyari, Mallami to resolve P&ID scandal – Buhari

How I directed Abba Kyari, Mallami to resolve P&ID scandal – Buhari

Former President Muhammadu Buhari, has explained how he directed his late Chief of Staff Abba Kyari and the then Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Mallami, to resolve the complications arising from the P&ID contract scam that would have robbed Nigeria of huge resources.

Buhari in a statement released on Sunday, said had Nigeria lost, “it would have required schools not to be built, nurses not to be trained and roads not to repaired, on an epic scale, to pay a handful of contractors, lawyers and their allies – for a project that never broke ground.”

“If Nigeria had lost its arbitration dispute with Process & Industrial Development in a London court on 23 October, it would have cost our people close to USD15 billion,” the former president lamented.
Saying that after Nigeria won, “all decent people can sleep easier as a result.”

Stating the efforts his administration made, Buhari said, “I tasked Abba Kyari, my chief- of-staff and Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, with finding a way, even at that late stage and despite so much conflicting advice, to get us a fair hearing.

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“Working with a number of different agencies and senior officials of government, we began to find a huge amount of evidence, not all of which Justice Knowles was to accept.”

The former president that the British judge had agreed that P&ID had paid bribes, noting also that “He agreed that one of P&ID’s founders had committed perjury. And he agreed that P&ID had somehow found in its possession a steady supply of Nigeria’s privileged internal legal documents, outlining our plans, strategies and problems.”

Wondering how Nigeria get to this point, Buhari said there are lessons to be learnt from the P&ID episode adding that affair shows how important it is to follow the legal process in resolving a dispute.

“It shows that given time and opportunity for each side to present their case, the temple of justice can satisfactorily resolve all disputes without resort to extra-judicial measures.

“It was definitely worth the struggle: this was an attempted heist of historic proportions, an attempt to steal from the treasury a third of Nigeria’s foreign reserves”.

How I directed Abba Kyari, Mallami to resolve P&ID scandal – Buhari